


Spiral movement

by Hotaru_Tomoe



Series: The English job [26]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: And homages, Brief mention of John/Mary, Comedy, Drama Free, F/M, First Kiss, First Time, Friends to Lovers, Happy Ending, Jealous John, Johnlock Roulette, Light Angst, Light Pining, Lot of ACD quotes, M/M, Not Season/Series 03 Compliant, Post-Reichenbach, Slice of Life, Slow Burning, Virgin Sherlock, not a wip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-21
Updated: 2018-02-20
Packaged: 2019-03-07 17:00:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 27,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13439244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hotaru_Tomoe/pseuds/Hotaru_Tomoe
Summary: It has been three years since Sherlock faked his death. He and John are living together at Baker Street again, solving crimes and going on with their lives. Everything seems exactly like it was before, but slowly, and despite some misunderstandings, something in their relationship begins to change.Chapter 10: More sexytime and love to wrap the story up.Update: look, now the story has a wonderfulcover, thanks toallsovacant. Please go and give them the ton of kudos they deserve!





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [Movimento a spirale](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1112274) by [Hotaru_Tomoe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hotaru_Tomoe/pseuds/Hotaru_Tomoe). 



> This is the translation of my first Sherlock long fic, written in 2012. At the beginning it had to be just a quick smut, but the idea grew wider.  
> It's a drama-free, post-Reichenbach fic: in the first chapter, Sherlock and John have already started to live together in Baker Street again after Sherlock's return to London.  
> Back then, I didn’t know that Mofftiss would have shortened the period Sherlock was away from London to two years, so I sticked to ACD canon and kept it to three years. John's reaction to Sherlock's reappearance is Doyle-style-cool, too. And Sherlock is a sharp-minded detective, but very naive when it comes to relationships and sex.  
> The title came to me reading the book quoted at the beginning of this chapter: I imagined them getting closer and closer in small steps, like in a spiral movement.  
> *end of the poetic moment*
> 
> The thoughts of the characters are in italic.
> 
> Many thanks, hugs and kudos to the lovely [FinAmour](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FinAmour/pseuds/FinAmour) who betaed this work, making it way better!

_Everything in nature follows a spiral pattern, and this is true that also for emotions. The emotions we experience give us an indication of the perspective from which we are creating reality, and the "spiral of emotions" is a vision of light to build the life we desire._

_(Elena Puntaroli - The spiral of emotions)_

  


Living with Sherlock Holmes, John Watson had been woken up in many different (and bizarre) ways, but a violent blast wasn’t on the list.

Yet.

But, on a early morning of March there was a loud explosion and, for a moment, John thought he was back in Afghanistan.

The captain of the fusiliers who was in him reacted instinctively, adrenaline kicking in; he grabbed the gun from the bedside table and rushed out of his bedroom, shouting to Mrs. Hudson to come back inside her flat immediately, for heaven's sake!

In the few seconds it took him to run downstairs, all the possible scenarios passed through his mind: what happened? A dissatisfied client? A criminal looking for revenge? Was it possible that someone from Moriarty's organization survived?

"Sherlock!" he shouted, opening the kitchen door, heart in his throat.

"It’s all right, John. Good morning," Sherlock replied calmly, while his fingers traveled fast on the keyboard of his phone.

John looked at him, upset: "What the hell happened here, and what is this terrifying smell?"

He covered his nose with one hand, eyes watering because of the pungent smell that stagnated in the air.

"Ammonium nitrate. Do you remember the bomb tube that exploded in front of the HSBC headquarters? Now I know how they did it," Sherlock said, as calm as a Buddha.

"Did you recreate a bomb in our living room?" The doctor screamed in disbelief at his own words, while the beginning of a heart attack that had seized him slowly receded.

Sherlock rolled his eyes, annoyed like every time he had to explain something obvious.

“On a small scale and in conditions of absolute safety."

"Oh really? Go and tell our carpet!" John replied, pointing to the scraps of burnt cloth.

The detective dismissed John's protests by waving a hand in the air: "Sacrificed in the name of science."

They looked at each other, and a second later they were laughing together.

God, that was something John had missed terribly in those three years. Not only Sherlock's low and vibrant laugh, but those moments of understanding between them, or chucking with him without restraint over nonsense.

"All right, I'm going to tell Mrs. Hudson that there is no terrorist attack going on," John said, still short-breathed from laughing too much.

"Wait,” Sherlock stopped him. “Even though our landlady is quite open minded, maybe you should… calm down, before."

"Don’t worry, the fright has passed."

"No, I wasn’t referring to that, it's about..." he left the sentence halfway, gesturing towards John’s crotch.

John looked down and blushed furiously: his morning erection showed off, tending his pajama pants; he had gotten out of bed at such speed that he hadn’t realized he was hard.

He cleared his throat, "Well, th-then it’s better if you go down to her, while I..."

Sherlock was scanning him with the same look he reserved to the corpses at Barts morgue, and this made John's embarrassment rise to the stars.

"What are you looking at, have you never seen morning wood?" He snapped.

The detective merely arched an eyebrow without replying.

John frowned.

"I... oh, sod it."

He walked awkwardly toward the bathroom: having a conversation like this with his *male* flatmate, when he still had a hard-on, was too much for him.

He locked the door, undressed and went into the shower.

"Congratulations, you! Perfect timing," he muttered, looking down at his cock.

In the last three years, it rarely happened to him to wake up with an erection; perhaps his life had been so empty and depressing that even his body had suffered, imposing a sort of psychosomatic abstinence on himself, but the problem resolved itself now that his life was again what it used to be.

Nothing that he hadn’t already experienced, after all.

First the limp, and now this: he was becoming an expert on psychosomatic disorders.

_"Both healed by Sherlock."_

He was about to turn on the hot water, but suddenly stopped in front of that bizarre thought popped up from nowhere: evidently waking up with the detonation of a bomb wasn’t good for his sanity, because, all right, he was grateful to Sherlock for many things, but thinking of him while he was about to jerk off, was out of question.

Absolutely.

He rubbed his eyes and leaned his head against the cold tiles, trying to think of something, anything else.

For example Katie, the new Tesco cashier, was a good fantasy. Brunette, petite, delicate hands. Yes, definitely a great idea.

 

Ten minutes later, John came out of the bathroom much more relaxed.

Sherlock was gone: he had probably gone to meet Lestrade to talk about that bomb case.

John felt relieved, as he didn’t want to go back to the embarrassing moment from before, and discuss male physiology with Sherlock.

_"And why the hell did he look at me that way? I mean, it would happen to him too, to wake up with an erection, and then..."_

Not that John was interested in knowing what Sherlock did in the privacy of his bedroom. In fact, John would have stopped thinking about it right now.

He put the kettle on, and swept the remains of their burned carpet in a trash bag.

His phone, leaning on the desk in the living room, vibrated. There were three unread messages.

**We ran out of sugar.  
SH**

**And also of muriatic acid.  
SH**

He had bought two liters of muriatic acid a week ago: what had Sherlock done with it? For the sake of his coronaries, John gave up investigating further. He continued to scroll through the messages on the display.

**Mrs. Hudson wants a new carpet.  
SH**

It was John’s turn to roll his eyes.

**You are the one who burned the carpet, why do I have to buy it back?  
JW**

He replied.

**Details.  
SH**

Was the synthetic reply that came shortly thereafter.

John laughed again, heartily. He had missed that, too: Sherlock’s nonchalance in avoiding taking responsibility for his catastrophic experiments and their consequence on the flat.

Sometimes the whole package was a little exasperating, but John wouldn’t have changed that life for anything else in the world: he had already believed he had lost everything once, and it had been enough for him, thank you very much.

**Why didn’t you wait for me? I could do the shopping this afternoon.  
JW**

**There’s no need. I'm just explaining the dynamics of the bomb attack to the inept forensics team of Scotland Yard. Dull.  
SH**

**And you must be at the clinic in an hour.  
SH**

John sat down for breakfast, writing a quick shopping list, and smiled: who knows if Katie was working that day?

A new message arrived on his phone right then.

**Don’t hit on the new Tesco cashier.  
SH**

The poor doctor choked on his tea. He could have lived with Sherlock for a hundred years, but he would never have become fully accustomed to the acuteness of his deductive abilities, especially when Sherlock wasn’t in the same room with him.

And, in all honesty, that was something he hadn’t missed so much during his absence.

**How the hell do you know about Katie? Did you ask Mycroft to control me with CCTV?  
JW**

He was certain that mentioning Mycroft would have put Sherlock in a bad mood. In fact, a petty answer came shortly later.

**Don’t try to be an idiot at all costs, John. You already do it too well when you're natural.  
SH**

John wrote and canceled a reply several times, then decided not to answer, and to ignore his advice.

He could tolerate Sherlock always interrupting his dates to drag him to some crime scene (they were interesting, anyway), but this time he hadn’t even asked the girl out, and Sherlock was already interfering: it was too much!

And if before he had only a vague intention to invite Katie out to dinner, now he would do it for sure.

 

* * * * *

 

Later that afternoon, at Tesco, when John lined up to pay for his groceries, he had already thought about the right words to break the ice with the girl. He smiled inwardly: there was a valid reason if in the army his nickname was _"Three Continents Watson”_.

The old woman before him took an eternity to put her groceries on the conveyor belt, and then spent another ten minutes to double check the receipt.

When finally it was his turn, John leaned towards Katie, on his face what he believe was a conspiratorial smile.

"Thank god! I was afraid that that lady wanted to spend the night here."

The girl shifted nervously on her stool, and mumbled: "Um... if-if you're in a hurry, sir, we have some self-checkout machines."

What a sweet thing! She was also shy.

"Oh no, I hate those hellish machines, I always end up fighting with them." He paused, then smiled again, baring his teeth: "And you can’t invite a self-checkout machine to dinner."

Honestly, he believed he had been nice and polite, not gross at all, that's why he was more than surprised when the shy Katie clung to the microphone and called the security.


	2. 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock and John have a conversation about sex and relationships, and John gets embarrassed.

**Misunderstanding explained. Dr. Watson will be home soon and will not be charged with harassment.**

**MH**

His brother was concise in his communications like he was in human relationships.

Obviously Sherlock didn’t miss the implied message, " _You owe me a favour",_ and it was equally obvious that Mycroft would have collected the favour at the first opportunity.

The detective placed the phone on the table next to the sofa, and put his hands under his chin: it wasn’t a big problem, just a minor nuisance, and John was worth it.

Twenty minutes later, the front door slammed shut, and John's steps echoed heavily on the steps: anger.

No, frustration, Sherlock corrected himself. Understandable, given John’s initial expectations about dinner with Katie, and how it ended.

An involuntary movement lifted a corner of his mouth, and Sherlock blinked: a part of him was glad that his best friend wouldn’t go out with her. He always felt like that when John’s flimsy flirts with a random woman went up in smoke, as he had foreseen.

He furrowed his eyebrows, slightly annoyed: no, _glad_ wasn’t an accurate term for it. Relieved. Yes, he was relieved, because, without women, John could devote himself full time to solving crimes with him, and writing about them on the blog.

To him, that life was enough to feel completely fulfilled, why didn't John feel the same? He had to investigate the topic further.

John entered the flat, muttered _‘good evening’ to him,_  opened the fridge, saw that it was emptier than the cosmic void, and sighed: "I’ll order something from Angelo, tonight I'm not really in the mood to cook."

"Katie's ex-boyfriend was stalking her and she had to ask a restraining order against him, that's why she reacted that way... She's not shy, she's on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and she's extremely suspicious of men, not to mention that she carries unresolved daddy issues from her childhood," said Sherlock, without abandoning his meditative position on the couch.

In a moment, John was next to him.

"Care to explain?" he asked, arms on his hips and a dazed expression on his face.

"I was in that Tesco three days ago, and observed her: she’s kind and smiling with female customers, she looks at them and has no problem in chatting with them. On the other hand, when the customer is a man, she sits stiff on the stool, never raises her eyes and talks to him only if she really need to. Conclusion: she’s afraid of men and doesn’t want to interact with them, because of a recent bad experience.

In her opened purse, that she has always with her, I saw the restraining order: it’s against a man called Eric Jonas, born in 1983. Since Katie's surname is Nelson, he is hardly a relative, very likely to be an ex-boyfriend.

She dresses elegantly and sophisticatedly, but wears a wrist watch that’s inconsistent with her clothing: she didn’t buy it, it's a present. The model is unisex, not for women, so a man chose it: a woman wouldn’t have made a mistake in choosing the right model. The strap is worn out, the glass and the case are ruined: the watch is old. Given the young age of the girl there are few alternatives to the fact that it’s a gift from the father. Why does she wear it, out of love? No, if that were the case, she would have regularly changed the strap and would have taken better care of it. Conclusion: the watch is one of the few presents she received from her father, one of the few times Katie has been rewarded for something. Katie knows she can’t have paternal praises, not as often as she would like, so she keeps wearing that watch, even if it makes her feel miserable because it reminds her of her father’s strictness."

At the end of that flood of words, John dropped into his chair, stunned.

"What is it? Do you think that my deduction is wrong, somehow?" Sherlock asked, opening his eyes.

"No, no," John reassured him, shaking his head. "It's just that I wasn’t used to listening to you anymore. You're amazing, as always."

"I know." Surprising John with a deduction, and earning one of his sincere genuine compliment, was almost as good as solving an intricate crime.

"But how did you know I was interested in that girl?"

"Obvious: you've always gone shopping once a week with a complete list, but in the last period you have gone from one to three weekly visits to that Tesco, and you buy few things: it’s clear that there is something that interests you in that supermarket. There are no special offers on the products, but last month a new cashier was hired: it's her that you are interested in. Or I should say 'you were'."

Indeed, John could put a nice tombstone on the idea of going out with Katie Nelson.

John scratched his neck, embarrassed.

"You’re right: if she sees me again in the supermarket, she’ll ask a restraining order against me too. Fortunately this time the manager rushed to say that it was a misunderstanding, because the security guard wanted to call the police. Ah, I will not be able to set foot in there anymore."

"Costcutter has lower prices," Sherlock said placidly.

"But if you knew all these things, you could have said to me: I would have avoided making a fool of myself!" John muttered.

"But I did."

"Are you referring to your message from this morning, _don’t hit on her_ , no further explanations?” He rolled his eyes, praying that some pagan deity would gift him with calm and patience.

"I had no time or way to explain it to you in detail, you just had to trust me and do what I said, instead of doing the exact opposite," the detective answered in a piqued voice.

"Well, once I could have trusted you, maybe, but after what you did..." the words escaped his lips before John could stop them, and a strained silence fell between them.

Sometimes John couldn’t stop himself from holding his fake death against him.

He knew about Moriarty and his threat, he knew about Moran and how Holmes had continued to protect him from afar, he had understood and forgiven him. Almost entirely, at least: every now and then, he still felt angry and unleashed his grudge, because, God, they had been three horrible years for him.

Now it happened less often than in the early days, when he didn’t lose any chance to hold anything he could against Sherlock, but sometimes it still happened: the wound in his soul was deep and healing slowly.

Sherlock seemed indifferent to his last phrase, lying on the sofa with his eyes closed.

He always took John's poisonous outbursts like that, in silence, as if nothing could touch him.

_"And yet you know it's not true, you know he has a heart, you've touched it more than once, and a heart can be hurt."_

John ran a hand over his eyes and mumbled: "Sorry, Sherlock."

"You have no reason to apologize."

"Yes, I do," he sighed, "I'm just annoyed at what happened at the supermarket. Hear what we will do: next time I spot a girl I like, I'll show her to you, and you’ll tell me if the relationship would be problematic or not, okay?" he joked, trying to lighten the mood.

"All romantic relationships are problematic, John, I've told you over and over again, you'd save yourself a lot of trouble if you just stop chasing them once for all," he said in a flat, slightly annoyed voice.

The doctor laughed, crossing his arms over his chest.

"Maybe you’re right, but I don’t remember having made a vow of chastity."

Sherlock raised his head slightly from the pillow and his gray eyes stared curiously at John. "Is sex so important to ordinary people?"

John hesitated for a moment, unable to speak, as his mind churned: the word _'sex'_ , pronounced by those lips, seemed so strange. His heart sped up and John became nervous: if, between them, Sherlock was the virgin, why he was the one feeling clumsy like a teenager?

He swallowed noisily and answered, "Of course it's important."

"Mmh.” Sherlock closed his eyes again, thinking. “Obviously I can’t recommend prostitutes to you: in addition to being illegal, I certainly don’t have to explain to a doctor the health and hygiene risks of this type of relationship. Isn’t masturbation enough for you to reach orgasm?" he asked, deadpan.

John gasped and stuttered: "S-Sherlock, are you out of your mind? You can’t talk about… that, like you were discussing the weather!"

The detective shrugged, surprised by his reaction, "I'm just trying to help you with your problem… not good?”

 _"He completely ignores what sex is like, so he talks about it aseptically, as if it were a geology essay, but if he only imagined..."_ John thought, licking his lips.

There was something fascinating about the oblivious and virginal attitude of his flatmate, but as John realized that he was sweating and a tiny bit excited, his brain fished out that catchphrase, _‘I'm not gay’,_ that he always said to people who thought they were a couple, and then kindly reminded himself that Sherlock was still waiting for his answer.

"It's not that it's not good,” John answered, clearing his throat, “but it's a very personal topic and..."

"But you're a doctor," the detective interrupted him, in a practical tone. "What do you do if a patient with erectile problems comes to you, do you get embarrassed?"

"Here we aren’t at the clinic and you, thank God, are not my patient," John muttered, covering his eyes. And he had thought that the scene from that morning, involving his erection, was surreal.

All in all, John thought himself to be an open minded man, and was firmly convinced that there was nothing to be ashamed of about sex and sexuality, but that conversation was making him uncomfortable, and he didn’t know why.

 _"It's the idea of Sherlock and sex, together, the idea of Sherlock having sex."_ he said to himself. And then enough, okay, thank you, he had got it.

"Anyway, I'm not just looking for sex: I'd like a real relationship, someone to talk with, to be friend with, a person to support and who supports me... Sometimes I think that I’ll be happy just sitting on the couch and watching a movie with the person I love."

Again, Sherlock's eyes were studying him intensely; John could sense the feverish work of his mind behind those icy irises, and felt naked and exposed under his examination.

He greeted with enthusiasm the ringing of the doorbell, announcing the arrival of Angelo's delivery man with their dinner, just as Sherlock was about to open his mouth again.

A few minutes later, in front of two portions of lasagne, the bizarre conversation of before seemed forgotten.

Sherlock ate reluctantly, as usual, and sent messages to Lestrade from time to time.

"How is the investigation going?" John asked.

"The case itself is solved, there’re left only some tedious legal quirks, and Lestrade thinks he has the right to bore me with that."

"Do you want to tell me about it?"

"It involves prominent personalities and you can’t write about it on the blog. I personally don’t care, but my dear brother would take down your blog at lighting speed."

"Don’t worry, I’ll not do it, but I'm curious to know how you solved it, it seemed a complicated investigation."

Sherlock's face lit up, he leaned toward John, put his hands under his chin, and began to talk: "The tube bomb and the following claim of responsibility were just a clever diversion to mislead the police investigation, and to allow the criminal to proceed undisturbed to his true objective. What made me suspect that there was something else behind the bomb, was that... "

John listened carefully, interrupting him from time to time for some questions: in those years alone, he missed talking with Sherlock, and now he would do it for hours.

Only not about certain topics.

His cases were just fine.


	3. 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> During spring cleaning, John learns something about Sherlock's life when he was chasing after Moriarty's minions.

It couldn’t be said that Mrs. Hudson didn’t take spring cleaning seriously, since she had threatened not to let her tenants set foot in their flat again, until they gave a semblance of order to it again. 

That meant no more breakfasts in the morning, or cakes, or that delicious beef in salt crust.

And no one could blame the poor woman: Sherlock was slowly transforming the living room into a junk shop, accumulating tools, scientific instruments and papers everywhere.

Yes, the brilliant consulting detective was the main, if not the only culprit for the realm of chaos in the flat, and now where was he? John asked himself rhetorically, tying up a pile of newspapers to throw away. 

First Sherlock had gone mad, saying that the living room wasn’t untidy, but just  _ 'differently tidy’  _ and he could find everything he needed without problems, then he had stated that cleaning was too dull for his superior mind, and had gone to Barts morgue, to supervise with Molly the progress of an experiment that involved the use of human diverticula.

And so, the poor doctor had spent the morning cataloging, dividing, dusting, cleaning, trashing.

Moving a chair, he hit a box resting precariously on the radiator: it fell to the ground scattering its contents on the floor, undermining John’s work of the last hour.

He rattled the best curses learned in years of military service, and looked at the papers with hate in his eyes, hoping they could catch fire by spontaneous combustion. When it didn’t happen, he sat down on the floor in an attempt to put them back in the box.

He had never touched that box, that Sherlock had brought with him after his return. There were manila folders full of documents written in foreign languages (he recognized German, Romanian, Turkish and probably Armenian) and police dossiers on numerous criminals, judging from the mugshots.

_ "Today they’re probably all dead, if Mycroft’s men can do their job." _

There was also a small wooden cigar box, which contained some photographs and three passports, all authentic at first glance, but probably fake. One belonged to a certain Roger Ackroyd [1], a twenty-five year-old American man with red, wavy hair, the second one to a posh French gentleman named Pascal Tournier, who had straight blond hair, and the last one to a fellow British citizen, Damian Wright, dark haired and with a mustache.

The photos portrayed the gentlemen from the passports along with some of the men of the police dossiers: Roger Ackroyd at a table of a pub on Piata Unirii [2], Pascal Tournier during a business dinner in a restaurant with a Mediterranean vibe, Damian Wright animatedly talking about something in front of the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia.

John put the passports and the photographs in front of him, and his eyes widened.

"Wait a moment... they’re all Sherlock!" He exclaimed, amazed. He hadn’t recognized him immediately, the disguises were perfect.

Was that the life that his friend had led in those three years, far from London? Changing identity continuously, finding and chasing criminals, travelling from one Country to another?

With a vague feeling of discomfort in the pit of his stomach, he ran his fingers over the photographs, trying to study the expression of his friend and to guess his state of mind, but he found that it was impossible.

In those photos Sherlock was just playing a role to deceive the criminals he was trying to catch: Roger Ackroyd had the sly and easygoing smile of an adventurer, while Pascal Tournier was the perfect emblem of a businessman. But nothing could be deduced about Sherlock: if he was satisfied with that life, if he had fun or...

"Found something interesting?" Sherlock asked, materializing from nowhere behind John.

Utterly scared, John screamed, throwing the photos in the air, and then bringing a hand on his chest, over his heart that was beating wildly.

"For heaven's sake, Sherlock! Another scare like that and I’ll die."

The detective only gave him a crooked smile, then turned his gaze on the documents John was holding, and the doctor stuttered, like a kid surprised by his mother with a copy of Playboy: "T-the box fell down and... I-I didn’t want to stick my nose in..."

"Don’t worry, it's not confidential," Sherlock reassured him, sitting on the floor next to him. "If it were, it would be at my brother's house."

John picked up passports and photographs, and put them back in the cigar box. He looked at Damian's photo and then looked at Sherlock, with an uneasy feeling of estrangement again. 

"You know, I could hardly recognize you in these pictures: they don’t look like you at all."

"This is the purpose of a disguise, John," Sherlock answered, raising an eyebrow. Wasn’t it obvious?

"I know," he exhaled loudly. "It's just that these pictures seem to belong to other people, other lives that I don’t know." 

This was the real reason for that feeling of discomfort: he felt left behind, ruled out from an important part of Sherlock’s life, as if in those three years Sherlock had drifted irremediably away from him, an ordinary former army doctor. 

Because surely chasing after Moriarty’s minions must have been a great adventure for Sherlock, probably the best of his life, right?

"No," Sherlock said, putting the manila folders back in the box higgledy-piggledy.

For a moment, John feared he had spoken out loud, but Sherlock went on, "These were just covers, fictitious identities, there is nothing true behind these names. We can destroy the passports, too, I don’t need them anymore."

"Because these covers are burned?"

"Partly."

John frowned at that sibylline reply, and Sherlock smiled.

"I'm not going to leave London again. This city and its crimes are much more interesting than all these places put together."

Sherlock stretched a leg and kicked the box with contempt, snarling, “All the criminals I've met were the same: brainless, greedy, only interested in money, weapons and drugs, so ordinary, predictable, boring! Not to mention that I've had to collaborate with my brother and his CIA friends several times: it's a experience that I don’t wish to repeat," he concluded with a grimace of disgust that made John giggle.

"I think that the feeling is mutual."

“Possible. Anyway, I don’t want to play being a spy anymore, it wasn’t funny.” He looked John in the eye, “and here in London there's everything I need."

John drowned in Sherlock’s verdigris eyes, and knew he was there.

In Sherlock’s world, among the few things he considered important, he was there.

The ugly feeling of uneasiness John experienced shortly before, was wiped out by another completely different emotion, that seemed like a vertigo. Not entirely unpleasant, maybe just a little too intense.

That was enough, though: they had to divert their eyes right now, or that thing, that is, the two of them sitting on the floor with their shoulders touching, looking each other in the eyes, risked seeming like something that it wasn’t.

_ "You're ridiculous! Snap out of it right now, John Hamish Watson!" _ The former soldier mentally scolded himself: Sherlock hadn’t any concept of personal space, it wasn’t the first time they were so close, and there was nothing different from the other times. 

Nothing. 

_ "And I'm not gay," _ he repeated to himself like a mantra.

He blindly grabbed a photo of Sherlock as Roger Ackroyd and put it under his nose, finally breaking the eye contact and the tense mood.

"You were smoking again!" He rebuked him.

"It was only for the role," Sherlock joked, giving him another crooked smile.

"Let’s say I believe you, but God help you if I find you with a cigarette in your mouth," he said, pointing his index finger at Sherlock.

"Oh, I will not need it, at least for a while."

Sherlock leaned to him with a flash of excitement in his eyes, "John, would you like to do something with me tonight?"

John's mind was flooded with a river of images that had no right to be there, and barely managed to articulate a "Wha-uh-sorry?", feeling his tongue heavy, like it had been anesthetized and then stitched to the palate.

Sherlock didn’t mean…  _ THAT _ , right? Not his virgin flatmate. There had to be another explanation. And why had the temperature in the room just risen by ten degrees?

Sherlock's smile widened.

"Tell me John, what do a door lock, three waste bins, and a Honda lawn mower have in common?"

The absurdity of that question was enough to push out John from his torpor. He blinked several times and frowned: "What kind of nonsense are you babbling?"

"Yes, it would seem to be a nonsense. This stuff was stolen from Highbury Fields [3] this week: apparently they have nothing in common, and this looks more like vandalism than real theft, but, hidden behind the nonsense, there is a very specific criminal plan that no one has noticed," he concluded, excited as a little boy in a candy shop.

"Oh," John exhaled, now much calmer. Of course there was an entirely logical explanation for that ambiguous phrase of Sherlock, which, besides, was ambiguous only in his stupid mind, not in the one of the consulting detective, married to his work.

Sherlock didn’t want to put anything in his mouth to replace cigarettes.

Anything.

"John, are you okay?" Sherlock asked, tilting his head to one side.

"Yes, yes, I’m fine," he replied hastily, "I'm just a little hot because of the cleaning. What did you say about these thieves?"

Better to change the topic, quickly.

Sherlock jumped on his feet and began to walk back and forth in the living room. 

"They are targeting some of the paintings of the Estorick collection [4], perhaps 'The hand of the violinist' by Balla and 'The portrait of Francois Brabander' by Modigliani. I’m almost certain that they will act tonight, and we must catch them red-handed."

"Do we need to alert Lestrade?"

Sherlock looked at him with contempt.

"Why not Anderson? They’ll ruin everything. No, we’ll not call the police, also because at the moment I see only their scheme, I know how they will act and what they want, but I have no evidence and don’t know their identity: it's not enough to alert the police. Now, hear what we're going to do..."

John listened carefully to the explanation of his friend, already picturing in his mind the adventure that awaited them.

"I'll bring the gun," he said, and Sherlock nodded, in his eyes that particular glint he had when he went hunting for criminals and that, John was sure, was also in his eyes.

Needless to deny it: they were both addicted to that lifestyle.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [1] Homage to "The murder of Roger Ackroyd" by Agatha Christie.
> 
> [2] One of the main squares of Bucharest.
> 
> [3] A park in London Borough of Islington.
> 
> [4] The Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art is a museum in Canonbury Square, Islington, and it owns the two paintings I mentioned.


	4. 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After an animated case, John has his first (but not last) Sherlocksexual crisis... oh my.

"Sherlock, run! I'll cover you!" John screamed, firing all the bullets in the magazine of his Browning against the criminals. No kindness for those who were shooting at them with an FN FAL. [1]

"No!" Sherlock shouted back.

"IT’S AN ORDER, RUN!" he roared, roughly pushing Sherlock away.

He reloaded his gun and offered an effective cover fire to his companion, then retreated behind the corner of a building, and let their opponents shoot; when he heard the unmistakable noise of a rifle jamming, he thanked his lucky stars, and fired again in the direction of the burglars, then he fled too.

Near a narrow, dark alley, someone tugged at his arm, pulling him over.

“John, it's me," Sherlock whispered before the former soldier knocked him out.

"Am I wrong or did I tell you to run away?" John hissed through his teeth.

"And I told you I wouldn’t do it," Sherlock answered with a smile plastered on his face.

"If those assholes don’t kill you, I’ll do it myself, I swear!"

"There's no time to bicker now," the detective cut short.

They heard footsteps approaching fast, and John tried to think of a defensive strategy, but Sherlock pushed him hurriedly toward an iron door, pulled a picklock from his pocket and opened the lock at such speed that it seemed he was using the key and not a burglary tool.

They entered, quietly closed the door, and went down the few steps of a small basement, dimly lit by the light of the street lamps that filtered through two small dirty windows located at street level.

John leaned against the wall under the windows, bent on his knees to catch his breath.

"Christ, I'm not young enough anymore for this shit."

Sherlock ran to him, concern clear in his eyes.

"John, are you hurt?" He did not bother to hide the worry in his voice, or perhaps he simply couldn’t.

"I'm fine, I'm about to spit lungs and spleen, but I'm fine," John reassured him, waving a hand in the air.

Sherlock’s worried feature turned into a smile of relief.

"Don’t be coy, Rambo."

"Shut up, Alexandre Jacob [2]. You opened that lock with the skill of a professional burglar," John replied.

"I know, I have always had an idea that I would have made a highly efficient criminal." [3]

"Oh god, what a terrifying thought," the doctor mumbled jokingly, unable to hold back a hysterical giggle, due to the adrenaline rush.

They just had a gunfight with a gang of easy-triggered burglars, risked ending up on the tarmac riddled with bullets, and there was nothing funny about it, yet in those moments (that, living with Sherlock, were quite common), John felt more alive than ever.

He saw Sherlock bite his lips in an attempt not to laugh, but it didn’t last long, and there they were, a couple of idiots giggling senselessly.

However, John was a little too euphoric, and his laughter thundered noisily in the empty basement.

"Hush, John!” Sherlock scolded him, “they're still looking for us."

Without warning, Sherlock pressed his hand over John’s half-open mouth.

Instinctively John snapped his lips shut, and caught a strip of Sherlock's skin. He felt his own breath gathering in the space between the forefinger and the thumb of Sherlock's hand and felt every detail of his thin fingers: the firm grip, the protruding knuckles, the calluses of his fingertips caused by the strings of the violin.

Sherlock’s thumb and forefinger were pressed on his cheekbones, the little finger against his jaw, the hand irradiated an unexpected warmth, and suddenly John became hypersensitive to the physical contact, almost as if Sherlock’s touch was burning his skin.

John mumbled and shook his head to protest, but Sherlock didn’t notice it and, hearing some noises from the street, pushed himself even closer to John.

It was a warm evening of mid-April, and Sherlock wasn’t wearing the scarf, so now his long pale neck offered itself to John's sight, allowing him to catch every detail of it: two thin parallel wrinkles, the strained tendons, three tiny moles in a line on the left side and a darker one on the right, the small and elegant Adam's apple. Sherlock’s neck was as beautiful as a work of art, and it had to be delicious to taste, John could bet on it.

He tried to swallow, but his throat was dry like sandpaper, and he was perfectly aware that it wasn’t because he ran: he was fantasizing about licking the neck of his best friend and the thought threw him into a panic.

He lowered his eyes but, unluckily for him, the first two buttons of Sherlock's purple shirt were undone, exposing the protruding clavicles and the small hollowness where the two bones met, which seemed designed to have lips put on it and sucked, sucked with such force to leave a red bruise. The pale skin, slightly sweaty, illuminated by the neon lights of the street lamps, shone; it seemed to ask to be touched to test its smoothness, and to beg to be freed from the tight embrace of the silk.

John's hands gripped the fabric of his jacket, to prevent the realization of that crazy project.

In a desperate attempt to regain control of his treacherous thoughts, he looked up at Sherlock's face, thus completing the series of very bad ideas developed in the last minutes. The black, disheveled curls covered his ear, and John wondered what it would be like to blow on them, see them rise and then fall back, soft and messy, or sink his nose in his hair and be intoxicated by the scent of Sherlock’ shampoo.

He was lucky that his mouth was covered.

Unaware of his inner turmoil, Sherlock was looking outside the window above their heads. He waited a few minutes and then stood up on tiptoe to check that the alley was actually clear, using John as support.

John panicked as the body of his flatmate leaned completely on his and, fuck, despite the layers of clothing between them, it seemed to him that they were both naked, skin on skin.

That mental image was the finishing blow, and John found himself having to deal with a half erection. Despite the solid concrete wall behind him, he tried desperately to plaster himself against it, to prevent Sherlock becoming aware of his hard on. He wished he could pass through the wall like an X man and escape from there as quickly as possible.

Feeling him shake beneath him, Sherlock seemed to remember him suddenly, and took his hand away from his mouth.

"Sorry."

As soon as he was free, John slid to the side, hoping not to be too hasty, to put a safe distance between him and his friend.

"Can we go now?" he asked, whispering to mask his shaky voice.

In the distance they heard the sirens of the police, quickly approaching.

"Yes, the thieves have run away for sure, by now."

"Well, let's go, then." John said dryly, and came out of basement in a hurry.

 

Sherlock, on the other hand, stood there, motionless, looking at the palm of his hand: he realized that, where it had been pressed against John's mouth, it was wet and warm.

He clenched his fist, wanting to capture every nuance of that warmth, absorb it through the pores of his skin and hold it inside himself. He still felt John's breath blowing over him, and the roughness of John’ skin, with just a hint of stubble under his fingers.

He didn’t even bother to lie to himself by saying that what he was feeling was a mere scientific curiosity.

What he was feeling was just _John_.

Normally he didn’t like physical contact, since he was a child he was easily annoyed by his mother's touch, or if some idiots ruffled his hair, like they were petting a dog.

But, oddly, the physical contact with John was pleasant, and that was the umpteenth peculiarity that made John so interesting and unusual in his eyes. Touching him, being touched by him, canceling the distances imposed by centuries of social conventions, had been completely natural for them since the first day.

Yet Sherlock sensed that the earlier contact had been different from all the others that there had been between them, because the warmth of John showed no sign of abandoning the palm of his hand.

"Sherlock? Are you coming?" John had come back and now was staring at him from the top of the stairs, frowning.

"Yes, yes."

 

During the cab ride home, they remained silent, and the driver's attempts at conversation fell on deaf ears.

After said a quick “good night”, John ran upstairs and threw himself on the bed, crouching under the covers, but he refused to give satisfaction to the erection that still throbbed in his pants, too frightened by the path that his thoughts would have taken in the throes of ecstasy.

_"Lips and teeth on that swan's neck, and hands tangled in his black curls."_

He had no desire to look inside himself, to analyze his thoughts, he only wanted to become blind and deaf and to forget that night.

 _"I'm not gay, I'm not gay, I just need to find a girlfriend,"_ he thought in despair, yielding slowly to a superficial and agitated sleep.

Sherlock, for his part, played the violin until three in the morning, when an exasperated Mrs. Turner showed up to protest with their landlady.

 

The next day, all the newspapers reported on the front page about the failed theft attempt at the Estorick Collection, and Lestrade broke into their flat with the excuse of yet another drug bust, but found no evidence that would tie them to the events of the previous night.

Passing next to John, Sherlock whispered: "Luckily we destroyed those passports for real."

John nodded behind his cup of tea and smiled.

He noted with relief that in the morning, in the cold light of day, the proximity to Sherlock didn’t cause further _troubles_ for him, and he was perfectly able to behave as if nothing had happened.

Not only that, he felt ridiculous for the panic that had overwhelmed him the night before.

 _"The adrenaline has taken away your lucidity. Yes, it was that, adrenaline, nothing else,”_ he repeated several times, in a sort of autogenic training.

Adrenaline.

Only that.

It sounded good, like an alibi.

However, he purposed himself not to look too often at Sherlock's neck.

All right, it had been only adrenaline, but it was better not to lead into temptation his mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [1] The FN FAL is an automatic assault rifle, used in many armies, but also available for civilians.  
> A few years after writing this story I learned that John’s gun we see in the series is not a Browning, but a Sig Sauer, but he could always had more than one gun, right?
> 
> [2] Alexandre Marius Jacob was an anarchist and a skilled French burglar. He inspired the writer Maurice Leblanc for the character of Arsene Lupine.
> 
> [3] From ACD canon, The adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton.


	5. 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A weird date leads John to new musings on his relationship with Sherlock.

If, in the next two weeks, John was able to set aside successfully the 'basement accident', it was thanks to his crazy flatmate, even if it was paradoxical.

Sherlock was bored to death for the lack of interesting crimes, so he became unbearable and capricious, and John was forced to watch over him closely, to prevent him from resuming smoking (or worse); he certainly wasn’t in the mood to appreciate the neck or any other anatomical part of his friend.

Just when John was about to run out of patience, a new client showed up with an intricate enigma that held Sherlock’s full attention, and allowed the poor doctor to chill out.

That day, after lunch, Sherlock had jumped up on the couch, shouting something about some 'Monsieur N' pirated DVDs [1], had sent an email and ran out, so John had finally been able to spend a relaxing afternoon reading ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ _,_ drinking a good cup of tea; he was just about to put the kettle on, when he heard a knock on the bathroom window.

On the fire escape stood a tiny woman, full of freckles, with absurd carrot-colored frizzy hair, barely restrained by a cyclist's helmet. After a moment of bewilderment due to her unusual location (normal people used the comfortable black front door to enter the building), John recognized her: she was Violet Smith. [2]

Sherlock Holmes had a network of homeless people who controlled the city for him, he knew writers, fences and other people who leaded a borderline life between legality and crime world, and who occasionally showed up at their flat to bring information.

John, in the posts of his blog, had renamed those people 'Baker Street Irregulars'.

Among them there was Violet Smith, a hacker hidden behind the innocuous appearance of the Pony Express. She was odd and pretty paranoid, like all hackers, but very smart, and Sherlock consulted her often.

"Good morning Violet, do you even know we have a door?"

"Hello, doc. There are too many CCTVs on the street for my taste. Isn’t Sherl home?"

The girl’s manner was brisk and a bit rude, she had the smile of a person who lived defying the authority, but she was nice and had a lively and cute face.

"No, Sherlock is still out."

"Oh,” Violet shrugged. “Listen, I don’t have much time now, I'll leave here the information he asked for."

She scribbled a '69' on a piece of paper and then she put it on the detective's laptop, along with a pen drive.

"The password is always the same, it's useless to change it, Sherlock always guesses it."

"Yes, I know something about it," John chuckled.

"I don’t quite understand what this case is about, but I think you will get a good story for your blog."

"Do you read my blog? I'm glad."

"Oh yes, I love reading about you two, you are a great couple, and you write very well, doc. You could be a novelist, I swear! My favorite post so far is that of the rigged exam." [3]

"Yes, that was…” John stopped with a cup of tea in front of his open mouth, shocked at her words. “Wait a minute: that file is not public, yet."

"C’mon doc, it's not a problem for me."

"I have the best firewall!" He complained, leaning against the kitchen table.

"Yes, without doubt, but I'm even better, otherwise Sherl wouldn’t consult me," she laughed, pouring herself a cup of tea and taking a seat next to him. "Oh, I swear I didn’t do anything illegal. Not on your laptop, at least."

John raised his hands.

"That's enough, I don’t want to hear anything else... Have you already agreed with Sherlock for the payment of that information?"

"Yes, yes, we're fine."

She took a long swig of tea and narrowed her eyes, like she was reflecting on something. “Hey, but if you want to offer me dinner, I don't have anything against it," she threw in with a smile.

 _"Why not?"_ John thought. Violet was exuberant, rowdy, and physically wasn’t his type of woman, but after having endured for two weeks a bored Sherlock, a night out had its appeal.

"Do you like Indian cuisine?"

"Um, not so much," she wrinkled her nose. “What about Japanese?"

"All right, tonight at nine?"

"Okey dokey."

"If you tell me where you live, I'll come to get you."

Violet gave him the address, then jumped off the table and went out the bathroom window again, muttering something about wanting to drive Mycroft crazy looking for her.

Sherlock returned a couple of hours later, and while he was still on the stairs, he exclaimed: "Oh, Violet has already found that information, excellent!"

"How on earth did you know she was here?" John asked in amazement. Did Sherlock also see through the walls now?

"Djarum Black: I think she's the only person in all of London smoking those clove cigarettes. It’s very light, but there's still the aromatic smell in the air.”

"I don’t smell anything."

"So not only do you not observe, you don’t even sniff," Sherlock said, then opened the laptop, nodded at Violet’s note and examined the contents of the pen drive, typing on the keyboard at a dizzy speed.

"Ha bloody ha," John replied, before realizing that the detective was already immersed in his Mind Palace.

"Fantastic, yes, just as I suspected," Sherlock mumbled, following his thoughts. “Please thank Violet for me tonight."

John smoothed a wrinkle of his jacket in front of the mirror.

"I won't even ask you how you deduced we’re going out. Anyway, I made you some roast beef, if you're hungry."

Sherlock had joined his hands in front of his lips and gave no sign of having heard him. For a moment John felt guilty about leaving him home alone, knowing that probably he wouldn’t move from that position or touch the food.

"And if you aren’t hungry, eat all the same," he sighed, before leaving the house.

 

The evening hadn’t taken the turn that John was hoping for. Not that he held high expectations about it, but it took him only ten minutes to realize that a former military doctor and a hacker had very few things in common. So they found themselves talking about the only common topic for both of them: Sherlock.

Incredible that he always managed to pop up during his dates, even when he didn’t show up in person.

"... and I was surprised when Sherlock told me he has a homeless network that gathers informations for him."

Violet nodded: "Sherl is clever: for the homeless, money is an excellent incentive."

"What about you? Doesn’t he pay you for your help?"

"Not in cash," the girl answered calmly, bringing a hosomaki to her mouth.

John choked on his beer.

"What?" he asked at the end of a frantic coughing attack.

"We have this agreement: I find for him informations, passwords, bank accounts… namely everything that exists on the Internet and, in return, he keeps Mycroft away from me, because he hates me. Trust me, you have no idea how bothersome his brother is! Just because I hacked his computer once… or twice." She looked at John’s still shocked face and started giggling, "Oi, what did you think?"

"Nothing, nothing," John hastened to lie, looking at his tempura.

Violet laughed louder, "Did you think Sherl and I went to bed together?"

John's blush was more eloquent than a direct answer, and the girl kept on talking with a strange twinkle in her eyes: "Nah. I mean, not that I didn’t have a little thought about it when I met him the first time. More than a little thought, to tell the truth: that body, those eyes…” she lowered her voice, leaning towards John with a conspiratorial look, like she was confiding a secret to her best buddy, “that bum, if you know what I mean..."

"I never noticed it."

John leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest, fearing that, from now on, he should have tried not to look at Sherlock’s bum, too. You know, not to lead into temptation his mind again.

"Ah, no?" She said, unconvinced, fiddling with her wasabi.

"I'm a man!” John snorted, “and I'm not gay."

Violet stopped with her chopsticks in the air.

"So what?"

"Well, usually a heterosexual man doesn’t appraise the body of another man."

And certainly a heterosexual man didn’t feel the desire to lick a *male* neck or bury his face in a cloud of *male* disheveled hair. John pressed two fingers at the base of his nose.

"That’s stupid, doc!" Violet continued, "He's tall, dark haired, has grey eyes and the body of a Greek god: a peculiar beauty like Sherl catches everyone's attention, man or woman. At least until he opens his mouth and starts insulting you, then you just want to choke or punch him."

"Nobody knows this better than me, believe me."

"If you say so..." Violet murmured.

"What do you mean?"

Dear Lord above, this was the most bizarre date that had ever happened to him.

"You live with him, doc, and you haven’t killed him yet, even after he has disappeared for three years, pretending to be dead. Besides, reading the posts of your blogs, one would say that you're very fond of him."

"Of course I'm fond of him, he's my best friend, but that doesn’t mean we have to go to bed together."

"No?" Violet asked with an amused smile, which widened even more in front of John's contrite face.

"Look doc, I don’t want to fight with you, I only say what I see. And, for me, the term ‘friendship’ isn’t the most suitable to describe your relationship."

"You're wrong," he replied, stubborn. Everyone was wrong: Irene Adler, the newspapers and even this obnoxious hacker.

"Oh, okay," the girl shrugged as if to say _'if you believe it...’_ , and ordered a dorayaki.

At the end of the dinner, John took her home, but when Violet lit a cigarette, he scolded her: "You should stop, you know? First of all it's not good for your health, and I spent the last two weeks keeping Sherlock away from cigarettes: if now I come home smelling like smoke, I risk undermining all my efforts."

Violet smiled with the cigarette between her lips, but didn’t put it out; in fact she exhaled a long puff of smoke.

"Doc, it’s nice that you worry about me, but, see... I'm not the one who would stop smoking just because you ask," she dismissed him, leaving him stunned on the sidewalk.

 

A few minutes later, Sherlock received a message on his phone:

**I return your doc to you, unharmed! I was good with him :)**

**VS**

Violet wasn’t surprised to receive an immediate reply: Sherlock had never granted her the last word:

**I don’t see why you should have behaved badly: John never did you any wrong.**

**SH**

The girl rolled her eyes: one more stubborn than a mule, and the other blind like a mole, what a phenomenal couple!

 

When John came home, Sherlock had already gone to sleep, but in the sink there was a glass and a dirty plate: he had eaten, despite being in the middle of a case.

 _" He’s starting to behave like a human being and not like an alien," _John said to himself, because he categorically refused to think that Sherlock had eaten just because he had asked him. Or that he stopped smoking only because it was John’s wish.

 _“Nonsense,”_ he told himself.

And how stupid and pathetic it was, to feel warmed by the sight of an empty dish?

He cursed Violet Smith and her insinuations.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [1] A 2003 French-British movie about Napoleon's last years at Saint Helena. My homage to the ACD novel, "The adventure of the six Napoleons".
> 
> [2] From ACD novels. It’s the name of the protagonist of "The adventure of the lonely cyclist", and then I gave Violet red hair as a tribute to "The Red-Headed League".
> 
> [3] Homage to the ACD again, "The adventure of the three students".
> 
> In the end Violet just wanted to scrounge a free meal at Japanese restaurant, she’s that kind of person, LOL!


	6. 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A back massage leads to another Sherlocksexual crisis for John, but this time also to a Johnsexual crisis for Sherlock.

During a sultry June afternoon, John came home after having questioned some people for a case they were working on, and found Sherlock drinking tea in the living room with a man in his thirties he had never seen before.

 _"He's not a client,"_ he said to himself, " _Sherlock doesn’t accept two cases at once, and certainly doesn’t bother to make tea for clients."_

The fact that he had done something for his guest was a borderline miracle: the few times John had asked him to tea, Sherlock had answered that he was too busy or too bored to do it.

Both men turned to look at him, and the guest’s smile brightened as he raised from the chair.

"Ah! Captain Watson, I guess," he said, shaking his hand vigorously.

John looked at him, perplexed: he was tall more or less like him, had a slim body, wavy brown hair, blue eyes and an open smile. No, he was sure he had never met him before, but only another soldier would have called him by his rank.

"Call me John, please. Who am I talking to?"

"Victor Trevor, Lieutenant of the 30 Commando [1]. I am currently on leave, so I took the opportunity to say hello to Sherlock and thank him."

John was already confused, but after that statement, he became completely lost.

"Some time ago he helped me to expose a spy," Victor explained.

Sherlock snorted, annoyed: "I just observed the facts: the trades of that soldier were obvious to anyone to see."

"No, just to you!” Victor protested, then turned to John, “is he always like that?"

"Yes. Unbearable, right?"

"A little bit," Victor admitted, laughing, "but since we put a traitor in jail thanks to him, I put up with him more than willingly. Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go."

Sherlock stood up and then proceeded to hug Victor warmly. Too warmly, according to John.

"And, um, thanks to you too, for that time... you know," Sherlock stammered awkwardly.

"Don’t even mention it."

John was increasingly confused by that conversation, and felt an unmotivated irritation grow towards that soldier.

Victor smiled at him, revealing a row of white teeth, "Pleased to have met you, Captain."

"It was my pleasure, too," John returned the military salute of the younger man with a certain coldness, and led him to the door.

In the meantime, Sherlock had sunk in his chair, reading The Telegraph in perfect silence. John stood in the middle of the living room waiting for an explanation, a comment, something.

In vain.

"Well?"

"Well what?" Sherlock replied, deadpan.

John sat down in his chair, determined to learn more about Victor Trevor and the circumstances in which Sherlock had met him.

"Who is that man and why does he know who I am?"

"I met him about a year ago and I talked with him about you," Sherlock answered evasively, without lowering the newspaper.

"And on what occasion did you meet a Lieutenant of the 30 Commando, who is currently engaged in ISAF?" [2] John asked, feeling his stomach dropping to the floor in dread.

"While I was chasing one of Moriarty's men."

The more Sherlock became evasive, the more John understood the truth, but wanted to hear it from his mouth.

"Where?"

The other lowered the newspaper, sighing, "Why this interrogation?"

"Where did you meet him?" John insisted.

"At Termez." [3]

That idiot. That bloody idiot.

John covered his face with his hands, and his voice sounded grim: "Please, tell me you've never trespassed on Afghanistan."

"If you want, I'll tell you."

"Dammit Sherlock, do you think it’s funny? That's a war zone!"

John jumped to his feet and went to the window, unconsciously clutching his wounded shoulder.

"I realized it, yes," Sherlock replied quietly, "but the man I was chasing was moving between Uzbekistan and Afghanistan, and I had to do the same."

"And what about Trevor, is he one of Mycroft’s men?"

"No, my brother didn’t know about my enterprise until it ended."

Sherlock smiled with obvious satisfaction, but John's hard expression reflected in the glass of the window led him not to boast too much about it.

"How did you meet him, then?"

"He was in charge of the unit stationed at Termez, and as soon as I arrived, I introduced myself to him with one of my false identities, but in the following days I discovered that one of his soldiers was selling information to a gang of local criminals in exchange for opium, and informed Victor. Later I revealed to him who I really was and what I was doing there, and he offered to be my guide: we gave each other a helping hand."

A guide? Did they think they were in a fucking tourist village?

John clung tightly to the window sill: if Trevor had been still around, he would have chased and punched him.

Instead of doing the right thing, that is, dissuading Sherlock from his purpose, tying him to the seat of a plane and sending him back to London (like John would have done), Trevor had followed his crazy plans, leading him into hostile territory, dominated by tribal groups and Talibans. Sherlock could have died thousands of miles away from home, in a rocky desert, and John would have never known anything, he would have never seen him again.

The thought made his stomach clench painfully.

How could that Trevor, a soldier like him, have been so rash? Civilians must be protected, not thrown into troubles.

His inner turmoil didn’t escape Sherlock's watchful eyes.

"I can take care of myself, and Victor is an expert of those areas," he said, thinking it was enough to reassure John.

"Do you want to tell me that it was like a relaxing trip to Monte Carlo, and you didn’t take any risk?" he asked sarcastically.

"No, we were ambushed by some common criminals in Hairatan [4], but..."

"Oh Christ, tell me where Trevor lives: I'm going to kill him," John groaned, running a hand over his face.

"But Victor noticed it in time and we managed to escape," Sherlock insisted. "He's a very good soldier, so..."

"NO, HE IS NOT!" John shouted. “A good soldier would never allow a civilian to go into a war zone to play 007. I would never have allowed it, if I were him, I would have never exposed you to such a danger, because… do you realize it or not that it was a potentially lethal situation, and your actions were suicidal? What the hell do you have in that brain of yours?"

John stopped to catch his breath, but Sherlock didn’t know what to say: his friend's outburst took him by surprise.

"And, above all,” John continued, “you went there without telling anything to your brother, who knows something about Intelligence, with a complete stranger who, as far as you knew, could be in cahoots with the Talibans, or with the man you were chasing. It’s a relief that, in the end, Trevor was only a monumental cretin. Oh, and don’t look at me like that: you didn’t know anything about him, how could you trust so blindly, what the hell does he have that makes him so special?"

"I can judge people."

"But you're not infallible: you were wrong about Irene Adler! Do you realize what could have happened if you were wrong about him?"

Sherlock shook his head.

"Frankly I don’t understand the reason of your outburst: it happened over a year ago and I'm here, alive and well; you're worrying now about things that have already happened, and this is ridiculous."

John barked a bitter laugh and left the living room.

"And now where are you going?" Sherlock asked, genuinely puzzled.

"I'm a ridiculous person, so I act like one," he shouted, slamming the door shut. He climbed the steps two by two and almost ran into Mrs. Hudson coming out of his room.

"I brought you back the sweater that I mended, but I chose not to interrupt you."

"Thank you very much,” John said, embarrassed, “and excuse us if we have raised our voices."

"We have?" their landlady asked rhetorically, and John realized that he had been the only one that was screaming like a madman.

The woman put a hand on his arm with a maternal smile: "John, dear, I understand you. I always lost my temper when a woman took too many liberties with my poor husband. But you, unlike me, have no reason to be jealous: I've known Sherlock for many years, and you have to believe me when I tell you that he has eyes only for you."

That said, she went downstairs to her flat.

John entered his room, dazed and feeling like a sleepwalker.

 _"Oh god,”_ he thought, upset, _“I haven’t just made a jealousy scene to my best friend, have I?"_

He dropped heavily on the bed: oh yes, he had done it, and full blown.

Great.

Now, thinking about what happened in the living room, he couldn’t even explain why he had yelled at Sherlock. He wasn’t angry only with Sherlock: it was true that his friend had put himself into a damn dangerous situation, behaving like a fool, but, well, he always acted like that.

Instead, he was mostly angry with Victor Trevor: the warm tone of voice with which Sherlock had pronounced his name, that timid and clumsy way of thanking him, had triggered something inside John.

Yes, it had been the idea that Trevor might have somehow taken John’s place, to make him so furious, because he was the only one who could protect Sherlock from danger and from himself, to stop him before he pushed his luck too far. No one else was able to do it, because no one else understood and knew Sherlock Holmes like him. And damn! Because he was there first, that special place in Sherlock’s life was his.

He couldn’t even remember all the times when he had faced a danger to get Sherlock out of trouble, and Sherlock had never hugged him. Then this little soldier came out of nowhere and his flatmate spread the red carpet in front of him.

Not that John wanted to be hugged by Sherlock, of course. It was just an example.

He waited for his little inner voice to remind him patiently once again that he wasn’t gay, but it seemed to have suddenly gone on strike.

He briefly tortured his hair with his hands, then decided to indulge in a long, soothing, hot shower; he stood and took off his shirt, throwing it on the bed, but he missed it and the garment fell on the floor.

Angrily, he bent down to pick it up and when he straightened up, he felt a jolt of pain next his right kidney, which took his breath away.

The doctor inside himself recognized an inglorious back strain; he tried to move a step but the pain snaked ferociously down the leg, that gave way. To avoid falling, John leaned with all his weight on the bedside table, that toppled, while he found himself crouched on the edge of the bed, like a child who was about to pray before going to sleep.

Not even thirty seconds later Sherlock opened the bedroom door unceremoniously. On another occasion, John would have had to complain about his violated privacy, but now he was too humiliated by his ridiculous position.

"John!"

"It's nothing,” he minimized, “only a back strain."

"Wait, I'll help you lie down on the bed."

"No, stop..." John feared that he would be brusque and ungraceful, instead Sherlock lifted his legs slowly, supported him while John stretched on his belly on the bed, and the whole maneuver was less painful than he expected.

"Thanks, it's much better now, I'll lie down until the pain passes."

"Yes, don’t move," Sherlock said, and darted out of the room.

"Very funny!" John snarled at him.

Sherlock returned shortly after with a steaming herbal tea and a little plastic jar.

"Drink," said the detective, "it's the tea I make for Mrs. Hudson for her hip pain."

"Do I want to know what's inside?" the doctor joked.

"No, not particularly, unless you want to keep arguing."

John just shook his head, then took the cup from Sherlock's hands and sipped the strong, aromatic tea.

"Thanks, and, well, I’m sorry for having yelled at you."

"You’ll probably feel a little weird later," was Sherlock evasive reply, no mention of their row, a sign that the accident was already closed for him.

"Weird? What do you mean?"

Sherlock didn’t answer, but climbed astride the bed, kneeling behind him.

"Sherlock, what the hell do you think you're doing?" John shouted, shocked and even slightly panicked.

Definitely panicked.

Absolutely and completely panicked.

Sherlock’s fingers rested with a feather touch on John’s low back.

"Is the pain here?"

"Y-yes," the doctor answered cautiously, and a moment later a fresh and gelatinous cream was gently spread on his lumbar area.

"Arnica, devil's claw and camphor," Sherlock explained, "I have learned from experiments that it works much better than the common analgesic ointments."

"Ah, thank you, but I could have done it by myself."

"In this area? No, it would have been hard for you."

Sherlock's fingers worked in concentric circles, pressing softly on the stiffened muscle to let the ointment penetrate under the skin, but the pain was still very strong and John's whole body was taut.

Sherlock leaned forward, "You're too tense, it's not good: it makes the pain even worse, you have to relax," he whispered in his ear.

"Easier said than done," John exhaled. Between the throbbing pain in his low back, and the idea of having Sherlock knelt on him massaging his bare skin, the word 'relax' had been momentarily banned from his life.

Sherlock applied more ointment and resumed the slow massage, this time using also the palm of his hand, pressing harder as he felt the muscles relax.

As he felt a pleasant warmth spread under his skin, John calmed down, leaning softly on the mattress and breathing deeply.

"Perfect," said Sherlock, and John could only agree: Sherlock was perfect, moved those long fingers with skill, like when he played the violin. Not even a physiotherapist would have been so skilled in massaging a contracted muscle.

Sherlock didn’t mean that, of course, but he was really perfect, John thought again with a satisfied sigh.

 

In the meantime, Sherlock looked at his watch: in his experience, ten minutes of massage were more than enough to relieve pain, however he was reluctant to remove his hands from John’s body. The feeling of John’s dry skin under his fingers, of the firm but at the same time soft flesh, was a new, unusual, and extremely fascinating experience for him, and his hands moved in ever wider circles, moving away from the strain, to caress John’ side and the latissimus dorsi muscle.

He slowed down the pace of his massage, to make that moment last as long as possible.

 

John rotated his neck slightly, and Sherlock's right hand rested hesitantly on his prominent vertebrae.

"Do your shoulders hurt, too?"

No, John didn’t feel particularly sore, but he wouldn’t have minded a massage up there, given how good Sherlock was.

A small compensation for the fright Sherlock had given him earlier.

After all, there was nothing wrong with it, right? It was just a massage, nothing more.

He merely grunted a neutral _‘mh’_ , leaving the choice to Sherlock.

Sherlock moved his fingers on the trapezius, testing the soreness of the muscle.

"Yes, it’s tense," he said hurriedly, and began to spread the ointment there too, hesitating around the scar of the bullet's exit hole.

Suddenly he was struck by a thought: "Is that why you got angry when I told you that I had been in Afghanistan, because of what happened to you?"

"Of course, you idiot... it’s a miracle that I’m still alive, and the only idea that you were in my same situation, made my stomach clench."

"And you blame Victor for bringing me there?"

"Yes."

"I see."

"Then avoid scaring me like that in the future," John grumbled.

Sherlock’s fingertips lingered on the outline of the scar, making it tickle pleasantly, like a silent apology made with a little gesture, then he resumed the massage, moving from the deltoids to the center of John’s back, going up to the shoulders, the sides and the base of the neck, and John arched imperceptibly under his touch.

God, he was really wonderful at that.

 

The more Sherlock touched John, the more he felt the need to continue doing it, again and again, forever. That was no longer a massage, a worried corner of his brain realized, it was only the urge to feel more skin, more John under his hands.

He was loving touching him.

He didn’t want to stop anymore.

 

John was enjoying every moment of that unexpected and pleasant treatment, especially when Sherlock's hands (inadvertently for sure) touched his most sensitive areas.

He mentally reproached himself, ashamed: he shouldn’t see something erotic in Sherlock, sitting on his thighs, stroking his bare back...

Okay, very bad choice of words, he told himself, feeling a suspicious tingling running down his stomach.

He should tell Sherlock that it was enough and he could stop.

Yes, in a moment he would have told him. In a moment. Just a few more moments of that divine massage, and then he would have made him stop.

But then a long chill ran through his body, when he felt Sherlock's fingers gently caress his ribcage with a feather touch, and then go up to the base of his neck. There they stopped for a moment and then, treacherously, Sherlock ran both thumbs along his spine.

John opened his eyes and held his breath, unprepared for the rush of pleasure that flowed quickly to his groin. His cock was almost instantaneously rock hard, and when Sherlock repeated the motion backward, it throbbed painfully, cruelly crushed between his body and the mattress.

He rested his forehead on his hands, trying in vain to calm down, but it wasn’t possible, not with those sensual, almost greedy hands that continued to move mercilessly along that very sensitive area of his body.

But how could he tell Shelock that his massage was exciting him?

He bit hard his lips to fight a shameful moan, and tried to stay as still as possible, to think of anything else that wasn’t his hard cock, but that delicious torture had swept away his rationality, and he didn’t even have the strength to wonder what the hell they were doing, he and Sherlock, on that bed.

When the pressure became unbearable, John lifted his pelvis to loosen it, hoping that his movement could be misunderstood for the search of a more comfortable position.

 

Meanwhile, Sherlock felt almost dizzy as he pressed his palms firmly at the base of John's back, watching the goosebumps on his skin and the involuntary jerks of his muscles.

He looked at his sweaty fingers as if they belonged to someone else's hands, as they moved slowly, almost scratching John’ skin and moving down to the edge of his jeans. It was only when his thumbs violated that border, disappearing beneath the fabric, that Sherlock seemed to recover from his stupor; he quickly jumped out of bed, saying that he had finished the massage, and rushed out of John's room.

 

John was panting loudly, holding his breath and trembling with excitement; his cock demanded immediate attention and this time he couldn’t ignore it: just the friction against the mattress was an unbearable agony, he was about to burst. He turned on his side, quickly undid his jeans and lowered his boxers, freeing his erection, grabbed it and began to move his fist rough and fast, ignoring the open door and the sobs falling from his mouth.

He still felt Sherlock's warm hands at the base of his back, his long fingers just a few inches from his buttocks cleft, and a powerful burst of pleasure clouded his mind. He rocked his hips, fucking his clenched fist, and with a twist of his wrist, the orgasm exploded violently, and John gasped a confused word between moans, stifled against the pillow.

It took him several minutes to stop shaking and regain enough lucidity to understand what he had said.

Sherlock.

He had invoked his friend's name as he came.

He rolled on his back, covering his eyes with one arm.

"Christ, I'm in trouble," he whispered terrified to the empty room.

 

Sherlock’s hand slipped twice before managing to open the cold water tap of the shower. He couldn’t explain what had just happened into John's room: he had regressed to a primordial stage, where reason no longer existed and his brain no longer had control over his body. Those low instincts, emotions and desires that he always managed to relegate to a remote corner of his mind, had exploded suddenly, overwhelming him and leaving him unable to think.

It was like that time in Baskerville… no, it was different, it was worse, it was a catastrophe.

Because in Baskerville he had had a more than valid justification for his panic attack.

Now what excuse could he plead for what happened? For how his body reacted to being close to John?

_“John, his naked back, his smooth, tanned skin, his breaths, the fascinating contraction and expansion of his rib cage. John.”_

He had never felt anything like this in all his life; he searched desperately in his Mind Palace, but he couldn’t find a term of comparison, or a name to give to what was stirring in his chest.

Feelings were a weakness, always and anyway, right?

So why couldn’t he dismiss them like he usually did? Why did he feel the urge to go back to John's room and resume what he had interrupted?

He threw himself without hesitation under the frozen spray, hoping that the water would drag along into the drain chemical weaknesses and unanswered questions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [1] [This one](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30_Commando_Information_Exploitation_Group)
> 
> [2] I know that ISAF ended in 2014, but it was still on when I wrote the story, and chronologically, it still existed at the time of the events of this chapter.
> 
> [3] It’s a city in southern Uzbekistan, close to the border with Afghanistan, and offered logistical support to Western troops. I cheated a bit here, because in reality the British army didn’t operate in this region, but this is fiction, right?
> 
> [4] Afghan city, also close to the border with Uzbekistan.


	7. 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock undresses in the middle of the street and John's feelings for him are in the open.  
> But when it comes to fight-or-flight response, John flights.

_He’s surrounded by total darkness, dense like oil._

_But there is another body next to his, between the tangled sheets that prevent him from moving. John feels his breath, his warmth, and also his scent, strong and familiar._

_He untangles an arm and stretches it, searching the source of that heat, but touches only the mattress. He gets on all fours then, and moves forward and forward on that bed that seems endless._

_He knows that there is that body, he hears the rustle of the sheets as he moves, always a millimeter beyond his reach._

_And he wants him, he desperately wants him._

_He has a void in the center of his chest, a bloody hunger that only that body can satisfy._

_"Come here," he begs finally._

_"Say my name," a voice whispers._

_"Let me touch you."_

_"My name."_

_"Please, I need it."_

_"My name."_

_He’s implacable in this, like in everything he does._

_"... Sherlock."_

_"Yes, John."_

_John stretches his arm again, and this time he grabs him. He presses his hands on Sherlock’s bare shoulders, blocking him on the mattress, crushing him with all his weight._

_"Now you can’t escape me anymore."_

_"Oh, I'm not the one who’s running away, John."_

_Biting his lips until they bleed seems a excellent move to silence him._

 

Bed - wardrobe - window - bed.

John was repeating that manic path for at least half an hour, since he awoke with stomach cramps from hunger. The previous evening, in fact, he had categorically refused to go down to dinner.

He simply couldn’t, not after what happened.

And Sherlock hadn’t even witnessed the grand finale. But perhaps he had heard it (how loud had he been? He couldn’t remember it), or perhaps he had simply deduced it; after all, he was Sherlock Holmes, the man who could deduce the life of any person by the way they combed their hair. Certainly he could deduce that John had jerked off, shouting his name.

Or that John had an erotic and wet dream about him.

He felt his face burning with shame: his best friend offered to help him with his back pain, and John reacted by getting aroused like a teen high on testosterone.

Damn.

Bed - wardrobe - window - bed.

_"It was the herbal tea, Sherlock said I would feel weird. Good god, who knows what's inside, I should have asked. Okay, anyway, it was that stuff." _

_"Repeat it a hundred times and maybe it will start to seem convincing."_

Shit.

Bed - wardrobe - window - bed.

John moaned desperately. His familiar ‘I-am-not-gay’ voice had deserted him, left for a distant island. That of Lost, probably. And it had been replaced, god only knows why, by an annoying Lilliputian Violet Smith.

_"Tell me, doc, how was feeling that magnificent bum resting on your legs? Was it also so firm in your dream?" _

Double shit.

Bed - wardrobe - window - bed.

It.. it wasn’t his fault! All the people around him insinuated that he and Sherlock had a relationship and... well… they influenced him!

 _"It was that tea!"_ The poor doctor said to himself once more.

 _"Very unlikely,"_ his mental Violet retorted mercilessly, _"unless you think Sherlock has deliberately given you an aphrodisiac drink that induces NC-17 dreams."_

Fuck.

Bed - wardrobe - window - bed.

His back humbly reminded him that pacing in circles around the room wasn’t a good idea, after a back strain, and John collapsed on the bed. And then he was quickly running out of curses.

All right, maybe there were some _anatomical details_ of his friend that he found interesting.

 _"Oh, that’s better, doc!"_ Violet clapped her hands happily. _"You're on your way."_

 _“Well, fuck everything,”_ John thought, with a bitter grimace, _“why keep lying to myself?”_

Right now there wasn’t a single aspect of Sherlock that he didn’t find fascinating, and it had been going on for months.

But it wasn’t just physical attraction. It was much, much more. It involved the soul and the heart.

"I'm in love with him," he finally admitted out loud.

And about one thing Violet, the real one, had been right: it wasn’t a matter of being or not being gay. He had fallen in love with him because he was Sherlock, the brilliant, crazy, wonderful, unique Sherlock Holmes. The man who had given him a new life, when John came back to London and thought he was condemned to a dull existence, the man who had taken that life away from him when he fell, and then gave it back with his return.

He couldn’t say exactly when his feelings had started to change, because the process had been slow and natural.

At the clinic where he worked, sometimes John leafed through some women's magazines in the waiting room. He remembered reading a letter a few days ago, from a reader, Anon75, who had discovered she was in love with a colleague she had known for many years.

_"At first I started to notice small details about him: the way he rested his chin on his hand when he was absentminded, the way he held the phone, his smiles when I passed him some papers, and then, a few months later, one morning, sitting at my desk, I thought 'I'm in love with him!' Here, just like this."_

Back then, John had laughed about that ridiculous confession with a colleague.

But here he was, in the same situation as Anon75, and with an unspeakable secret to keep inside himself.

And, thinking back about the previous night, he couldn’t say that he had started on the right foot.

The mini Violet in his head frowned: _"Why unspeakable, doc?"_

_"You're joking, right?"_

He jumped up and started walking again.

Bed - wardrobe - window - bed.

He couldn’t confess to Sherlock that he was attracted to him. Good heavens, he could hardly admit it to himself! Besides, Sherlock always declared he was married to his job and that relationships weren’t his area. He would never have been interested in such a thing with John.

Confessing his feelings would only irremediably ruin their friendship, because after Sherlock's rejection (and John was sure he would reject him) nothing would be the same, they couldn’t continue to live together, it would be too embarrassing.

Eventually one of them would have to leave Baker Street, and for John it would be like losing him a second time.

No, never.

He couldn’t help but repress and forget his feelings for Sherlock. But the real question was: could he do it?

"Any other alternative?" he murmured out loud, discouraged.

No voice answered.

Of course: there was never a deus-ex-machina when one really needed one. What a colossal rip-off life was!

Shortly thereafter, someone knocked lightly on his door.

"Come on," John answered, believing it was Mrs. Hudson.

Instead it was the subject of all his thoughts and troubles. If John had been less agitated, he would have caught all the anomaly of a Sherlock knocking on the door instead of breaking into his room. [1]

"G-Good morning."

Oh God! Now he was also stuttering like a girl with her first crush?

"Hi, how's your back?"

"Oh, better, much better, thank you."

"You’re welcome."

Sherlock stood on the threshold, his hands buried in his trouser pockets, shifting the weight from one foot to the other.

"Lestrade called: there’s a real estate agent murdered at The Porcupine, a pub on the Charing Cross Road. It seems an interesting case, do we want to take it?"

"I can’t," John said hastily, and the lie left his lips before he knew it, "I have to cover Sarah’s shift at the clinic."

John couldn’t be near Sherlock, not now, he was still too dizzy.

Of course, this didn’t prevent him from feeling like shit for having lied to his best friend.

God, what a horrible situation.

"I see," Sherlock answered, and left his room.

John covered his face with his hands: what the fucking, sodding hell was he thinking? As if the only consulting detective in the world couldn’t deduce that John had just lied to him.

John ran out and looked down.

"Sherlock?"

The detective raised his head to look at him.

"But if you need me, call me, I'll be right there."

A sharp nod was the only answer he got.

 

John’s phone rang an hour later, as he was listlessly eating his breakfast, because his shift at the clinic began only in the afternoon.

It was Lestrade.

"Greg, did something happen?" he asked immediately.

"No. I just wanted to know if Sherlock had come home; he was here at the crime scene until twenty minutes ago, then I went to speak with a couple of witnesses, turned around and he was gone. And obviously he isn’t answering my calls and messages."

"He is not here, but now I'll try to call him, too."

"Er..."

"There's more?"

"I know it's none of my business, but did you fight?"

"Why?"

"Today he was more grumpy and offensive than usual: it’s a miracle that Sally didn’t strangle him and then hide the body with Anderson's help."

"Oh my God, it's not that we argued... it's..."

_"... I have a problem: I have discovered that I am in love with him, and I can’t be next to him without getting aroused."_

"It's complicated," he said. And it was. In John’s head there was a huge chaos, he just couldn’t come out to Greg now.

"Of course it's complicated,” Lestrade laughed, “with Sherlock everything is."

"Yeah, I'll let you know when I find him."

John ended the call and typed a message for Sherlock:

**Where are you? Lestrade is looking for you.**

**JW**

He didn’t receive an answer, so tried again:

**I know that you read the message, care to answer me?**

**JW**

In the meantime he got dressed and was already on the stairs. Still no reply.

He played his last card:

**Sherlock, you're making me worry. Tell me where you are.**

**JW**

It would have been mean, if John hadn’t been a little worried for real for Sherlock’s silence. And finally his phone vibrated:

**I’m in front of the Westminster Reference Library, St. Martin's Street.**

**SH**

**Wait for me, I'll be right there.**

**JW**

Near Leicester Square: at least half an hour by cab, considering the morning traffic, but about half the time if he took the Tube [2]. Five minutes later he took the Bakerloo Line to Piccadilly Circus.

 

*

 

It was really too much to expect Sherlock to actually listen to him, so John wasn’t surprised when he didn’t find him in front of the library, but he had no trouble finding out where his friend was, when he heard an angry voice coming from the nearby Orange Street.

In fact, Sherlock was there, near the back entrance of a pastry shop, apparently intent on explaining to a huge chef that his wife had an affair with the Porcupine’s bartender.

And fortunately the man, despite his massive size, had to be a supporter of non-violence, since he didn’t break a rolling pin on Sherlock’s head, but only hit him with, in order, a mousse, a cheesecake and a tiramisu, before John was able to intervene to placate the man and to drag Sherlock away.

"It's not with me that he should get angry!" Exclaimed the outraged detective.

"Well, yours is not the right way to give delicate news, Sherlock."

Sherlock rolled his eyes.

"Nonsense: the words I used don’t change the substance of the facts, that is, his wife is the bartender's lover."

"Kinder words would have saved you this," John pointed to his whole figure with his hand, taking a moment to contemplate how ridiculous Sherlock was, with his clothes soiled with small pieces of cake and biscuits and his hair soaked in huge amounts of cream, and he began to laugh like a maniac.

"It's not funny," Sherlock growled, sullenly, “John, stop!"

"I'd give a kidney to have a good camera right now."

Sherlock sulked more, and John laughed louder: the contrast between his austere figure and the swirl of cakes that stained his clothes was too ridiculous. He had never laughed so much in his life and he wasn’t sure that human lungs had been designed to withstand such a prolonged absence of oxygen.

However, the laughter died in his throat and his stomach twisted in fear at the sight of Sherlock, who dropped his jacket on the ground and pulled off his white shirt from his head, swinging his hips slowly, and remained shirtless in the middle of the road. It wasn’t the first time John saw Sherlock undressing, but now, with feelings and desire involved, it was quite different.

It was a damn problem.

"Sherlock, are you crazy?" John gasped.

"No cab will take me, if I soil the seat with cream," Sherlock retorted, deadpan and rational as usual. [3]

"But-but you can’t go around like that."

John stared insistently at a pink chewing gum attached to the sidewalk, not to look at him.

"Let me borrow your shirt or vest, then."

One of his garments, on Sherlock’ smooth skin, which would have been impregnated with his smell, and that later, in his room, behind closed doors, John could use for...

"No!” John wheezed, “I’ll not undress in the middle of the street."

Sherlock snorted, annoyed by his lack of cooperation, “Then I see no other solution."

He picked up his jacket and shirt, and a fat knob of brown cream dripped from his hair onto his collarbone. Sherlock looked at it and calmly picked it up with his index and middle fingers.

 _"Oh god no, please don’t do it, don’t do this to me,"_ John begged silently.

Unaware of his silent supplication, Sherlock opened his mouth to accommodate his fingers up to the second knuckle, sucking and licking until they were clean. A tiny drop of cream stood for a moment on his lower lip, before Sherlock sucked it between his teeth and then released it, clean but moist with saliva.

"Whiskey mousse," he pronounced, with a click of his tongue.

John had been staring at this involuntary erotic show, wide-eyed, his mouth half open and his breath shallow, unable to look away, unable to think of anything other than those lips. A hot shiver ran down his spine, and his jeans were suddenly too tight.

"John?" Sherlock’s voice was hesitant, perhaps incredulous.

The doctor winced, looked up from Sherlock’s mouth to his eyes, and knew he was fucked: Sherlock had understood everything.

His unspeakable secret had lasted no more than three hours against Sherlock's extraordinary deductive ability.

"John..." Sherlock repeated, even more uncertain than before, taking a step toward him, but John stepped back and looked away.

"N-no, my work... I must go..." he mumbled, and then left quickly in the direction of the Tube.

He fled, hoping to leave behind and forget the image that Sherlock's naively obscene gesture had created. The image of John dragging Sherlock into the shadow of the door, forcing him to his knees, opening the zip of his jeans, and fucking that perfect mouth, grasping the soft, dark curls to guide and bend Sherlock to his desire.

 

At the clinic, time passed slowly, like in a strange hallucination, and when he was about to prescribe viagra to a eighty year old lady with digestive problems [4], Sarah told him sympathetically that it was better if he went home earlier.

 _"I can’t go home, I don’t know what to say to him,"_ John thought, on the edge of despair.

He saw a bus and climbed on it, without even bothering to wonder where he was going.

He got off near Middle Temple Gardens [5] and lingered on a bench with his head in his hands until it got dark, but it didn’t help: he had no idea how to deal with this topic with Sherlock, nor could imagine how he would react.

In a bad way, and rejecting John’s sentiments politely, as had already happened the first night together, that was sure. But beyond this, his poor imagination was of no help to him.

He certainly couldn’t sit there all night, so he finally got up and started to walk listlessly along the street, when he saw a woman dressed in a long light green evening dress and high heels coming out of a shop; she slipped down from the sidewalk with a frightened little cry, and John's gallantry made him spring forward and grab her, preventing her from falling on the street.

"Are you hurt?"

She studied him for a moment, then she twisted her lips: "I think so… the ankle."

John knelt before her, took off her shoe and examined her foot.

"It just looks like a slight sprain."

"Well, this is a problem: I have to catwalk the day after tomorrow."

Straightening his back, John realized he was in front of a model. She was young, tall, skinny, was wearing a dress that probably cost as much as a year's rent at Baker Street, and she had dark hair and big blue eyes.

Eyes that could have been mistaken for grey, in the deceitful light of the street lamps.

He shook his head: that was a very dangerous drift for his thoughts.

Passing an arm around her waist, John made her sit at the outdoor table of a pub, resting her leg on a chair, went in, and asked for ice and a plastic bag to improvise an ice bag for the woman.

When he came out again, he saw that the woman had ordered two Rob Roys [6] and was beckoning him to sit down.

"So, are you some sort of savior angel?" she joked, revealing a strong US accent.

"No, I'm just a doctor," he answered, swallowing the strong, dry drink.

"And do you have a name, doctor?" she asked, bringing a strand of dark hair behind her ear.

"John Watson."

She extend a thin hand, with long fake nails decorated with butterflies, and John clasped it in his own.

"Mary Morstan."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [1] Inspired by ACD canon: Watson often says that Holmes enters his room in the early morning, without bothering to knock.
> 
> [2] Never been to London, so I don’t know if the route time is right. Blame Google maps if it’s wrong :p
> 
> [3] Tribute to THoB: "None of the cabs would take me."
> 
> [4] Tribute to Dr. House's 2x10 episode, "Failure to communicate", where House prescribes viagra to a woman with low pressure problems.
> 
> [5] London Gardens located along the Thames.
> 
> [6] Cocktail with red vermouth and scotch.


	8. 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A long night of mistakes and meditation for our pair of lovely idiots.

"As soon as you get home, Miss Morstan..."

"Mary," the woman interrupted him, strengthening the grip on his hand.

"Mary," John agreed. "As soon as you get home, you should apply an ointment for muscular traumas and make a tight bandage."

"But I'm not able to," the woman whined. "Would it be too much trouble for you to come with me and do it?"

"There isn’t anyone else who can help you?"

"No, I’m staying in a hotel: I'm in London just for fashion shows, and I’m alone," she remarked with a smile.

John scratched the back of his neck.

"Actually, I should..."

_"I should go home and tell my flatmate that I'm in love with him, and listen to him as he tells me again that he's flattered, but no, he's not the slightest interested in it."_

Mary caught his hesitation.

"John, do you think it’s fair to abandon a patient in need?"

"Well..."

"And if someone is waiting for you at home, you can always blame me for the delay."

“All… allright.”

The woman smiled, paid for the cocktails, raised an arm and stopped a cab. "Washington Mayfair Hotel, on Curzon Street," she said to the driver.

 _"I shouldn’t,"_ John reproached himself. He was just procrastinating his return home, escaping the confrontation with Sherlock.

He was running away, just as the Sherlock from his dream had said.

Then Mary took advantage of a curve taken too fast to lean against him, and invested him with the smell of her expensive French perfume. She smiled firmly, looking him straight in the eye, in case her intentions weren’t clear enough.

Purposeful and used to getting what she wants, Sherlock would have described her like that.

And right then, with too much alcohol in his body on an empty stomach, John didn’t have the strength to escape such a combative will.

He just wanted to stop thinking about what he couldn’t have.

 

* * * * *

 

The jet of water had washed away all the sticky residue of the cakes that had soiled his clothes and body, but Sherlock didn’t move, sitting motionless in the shower, his back against the wall, his legs against his chest, closed in his Mind Palace.

He needed to analyze what happened between him and John near the pastry shop.

John was sweating a lot, but that could have been caused by the hot summer heat.

Accelerated breathing. John hadn’t run, nor he fought with the pastry chef. He had no apparent physical reasons to be breathless.

Dilated pupils. Sherlock hadn’t been really close to John, but he had caught the blue of his irises being swallowed up by the black of the pupils.

Arms stretched along his sides, fists clenched, as if he was holding back with great effort.

Last and most obvious clue: the erection. Appeared when Sherlock had licked his fingers. A gesture that he didn’t want to be symbolic, but that for John had been.

Conclusion: John was excited because of him.

John had been silent, but his whole body had spoken, and the strength of his desire had invested Sherlock full force.

The sensation had hit him intimately, and touched strings buried deep inside him, forgotten, disowned. Strings that only John could reach and make vibrate with disarming ease. In front of John, Sherlock had no barriers or defenses, had never had.

And when John had run away, he had felt the urge to run after him, reach and wrap his arms around him.

Instead he had stayed there, distraught by the crackle of his own emotions: he had never felt physical attraction to someone before, so, even if he had stopped John from running away, he wouldn’t have known what to do.

But if John wanted him, why had he run away? This Sherlock couldn’t understand.

John, his conductor of light, would help him to put in order the thoughts that whirled in his Mind Palace, and to give a name to that feeling that he alone couldn’t pronounce.

So he stayed there, under the spray of water, waiting for the return of his heart.

 

* * * * *

 

 _"John Hamish Watson, do you think this will solve your problems?"_ John thought, when the Washington Mayfair elevator doors opened onto the top floor suite.

He made Mary sit on the bed and sighed.

"Am I so heavy?" Mary asked, misunderstanding the doctor' sigh.

"No, on the contrary: you are too thin."

"It can’t be helped: I need to work."

"But you really should eat more," and for a moment Sherlock’s face appeared before his eyes, instead of Mary's.

God, he was messed up.

He tried to concentrate on the ankle bandage, which hadn’t swollen a at all. As a doctor, he knew that there was no sprain, that if he was there, on that royal bed, in that luxurious room, it was only because of a whim of the woman in front of him, who perhaps only had a weakness for gallant gestures and sweet talking, or perhaps was just looking for a one night stand, and he or anyone else wouldn’t have made any difference to her.

And not even for him, after all; that Rob Roy had made everything more muffled and unreal.

He looked up at Mary, at her high cheekbones, at those scarlet lips.

In the dim light of the room she looked so much like him, but kissing her gave him a strange sensation, and the lipstick had a chemical and bitter taste.

Mary's eyes were bright and sparkling blue, wanting to see them grey was only a lie.

They weren’t Sherlock's eyes.

That was why it was wrong.

That was why John closed his own eyes.

The woman reached over to the bedside table, retrieving a box of condoms and lubricant, then the precious Gucci dress fell to the floor.

She was beautiful. Objectively she was a magnificent woman, proud of her body and self-confident, free from bonds and with a strong will.

Once, John wouldn’t have hesitated for a moment to use all his seduction weapons with a woman like that. While he was at the university, or before leaving for Afghanistan, that situation (a pub, a short flirtation, some dirty jokes, a hotel room, and no long-term commitment) was almost usual for "Three continents Watson".

And Mary was soft and warm between her legs, when she guided John's hand on her.

Yet now it seemed only a sordid compromise, a cowardly escape, it was like hiding his head in the sand, just because he didn’t have the guts to tell Sherlock that he loved him.

Now everything was wrong.

It was so wrong it hurt.

 

* * * * *

 

Sherlock remained in the shower until the boiler ran out of hot water.

John hadn’t come back home yet. He wouldn’t come back that night, Sherlock was sure.

He threw himself on the bed, letting himself be swallowed by the darkness and the heat of Summer.

He returned with his thoughts to his last night in Termez.

 

_The night is dark from the roof of the military barrack on which has has climbed, lit only by the moonlight. Was it waning or crescent moon? He has no idea._

_John would know. John would like very much the Earth’s natural satellite, hanging in the sky, and also that pale ribbon of stars that seems to trace a path in the depths of the night. [1]_

_A long path that leads to London._

_But the road is still long. Killing one of the leading exponents of Moriarty's organization in the Middle East has been a big step forward, but it’s still not enough, and tonight Baker Street seems farther away than ever._

_He hears light footsteps on the ladder that he has leaned against the wall of the barrack: it’s  Victor, who lay down beside him with his arms intertwined under his head._

_"I knew I would find you here."_

_"Did they get angry over the destruction of that armored vehicle?"_

_The shooting against his opponent has proved to be slightly more challenging than expected._

_"At first I thought the Colonel wanted my head, literally, but then a phone call came from London and he became as meek as a little lamb. You obviously don’t know anything about this, do you?" Victor smiles._

_He is a man who smiles a lot, often inappropriately, and he’s overly optimistic. But he is the least stupid man within miles. This is why one day Sherlock talked to him about himself, his life in London, and John._

_Sherlock shrugs._

_"I just called my brother to let him know where I am."_

_"Well, thank you."_

_"Now we're even."_

_They are silent for a long time, their eyes fixed on the stars._

_It’s Victor the one who breaks the silence: "You two look at the same sky."_

_Sherlock looks at him with a confused frown. Sometimes Victor talks nonsense._

_"You and John look at the same sky," Victor explains patiently. "That's what I always say to myself when I miss home and Bertha."_

_"Is it your dog?"_

_"No, she’s my girlfriend." Victor replied, a little annoyed. "I've told you at least ten times."_

_"I'm not nostalgic," Sherlock replies, "I'm just tired of confronting unworthy opponents: they're all boring and too stupid for my superior intellect."_

_There’s a long silence again, then Sherlock resumes talking: "Except John. With him, this adventure would be a lot more fun."_

_He says it so softly that Victor doesn’t know if he's talking to him or to himself._

_He's a strange man, this Sherlock Holmes. Victor has known him for a month and can’t say he understands a thing about him, or about the bond he has with this John. But despite the extreme oddness of the man lying next to him, he thinks that John Watson is very lucky to have a friend like him. _

_"It will be all right, you will destroy this mysterious secret criminal organization and return home."_

_Sherlock shakes his head._

_"There are too many variables, it’s not possible to make a precise estimate of the success rate of it."_

_" Except that it is." _

_"How can you say that?"_

_Victor's smile is so bright and sure that for a moment Sherlock almost thinks he’s able to look into the future._

_"Because it's not about calculations or estimates. You and I are here for the same reason, to protect the people we love, and you are stronger when you have someone to protect." [2]_

 

Yes, if Sherlock had been strong in those three years (and he had been), it had only been for John.

John was the reason why he had destroyed Moriarty’s criminal organization.

If it wasn’t for him, maybe Sherlock would have fiddled with the idea of really ending it all on that roof. He would no longer find an opponent equal to Jim, and life didn’t seem so interesting without a clever, ruthless nemesis. If it weren’t for John.

Sherlock lie awake, waiting for his return, but John didn’t come back that night. Every now and then it happened, especially in the early days. A life ago. But never since he had returned, except for the innocent dinner with Violet.

That morning, when John had run off from Orange Street, something had cracked in the balance of their relationship.

What if John never came back? If, from now on, he had to live alone, without the sound of John's footsteps in the room above? Without his _good morning_ , the breakfast always set for two, without John tapping on the keyboard of his laptop, sitting in front of him?

Sherlock had already been alone, and that was how he had lived during the last three years of his life. The prospect of being alone again should have left him indifferent, it shouldn’t have made him shiver like it was full winter.

Curling under the sheets didn’t chase away the cold.

 

The morning after, Mrs. Hudson came into the living room with breakfast, calling out to her boys.

When Sherlock told her that it wasn’t necessary to lay the table for John, because he hadn’t returned that night, Mrs. Hudson stroked Sherlock’s hair in a tender maternal gesture, and then said that John Watson should mend his sweaters by himself, from now on.

 

* * * * *

 

The sun shone mercilessly on his face when John turned on his back. He squinted his eyes at the too strong light, and at the headache hammering in his head.

He glanced at his wristwatch and was dismayed to find it was almost ten o'clock in the morning. Why hadn’t he heard Mrs. Hudson call him for breakfast?

Because he wasn’t in his bed in Baker Street, that's why. He wasn’t at home.

It was on the fourteenth floor of one of the most luxurious hotels in London, in the bed of a woman he met the night before.

He got up, picked up the two used condoms from the floor, and threw them in the bin, taking a quick shower and taking advantage of the hotel's welcome kit which also included disposable razors.

On the table in the small living room of the suite, there was a breakfast tray full of fruit, bread and five types of jams, a full teapot, milk and coffee. He hadn’t touched food since noon of the day before, but just the thought of eating something gave him a wave of nausea.

On the table, next to the tray, there was a pink memo with a few lines written in a minute and elegant handwriting: _"Today I'm at rehearsals for a fashion show, I've ordered the maid not to disturb you. Thank you for your assistance, doctor."_

John took a pencil and tapped it for a long time on the pink card, but he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Probably because there was nothing to add to the adventure of a night, which had passed without leaving any mark.

It wasn’t what his heart wanted. Not anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [1] Obviously that “star path” is the Milky Way, but since Sherlock has no astronomical knowledge I thought he did not even know the name of our galaxy, or what he was looking at.
> 
> [2] _You are stronger when you have someone to protect._ This beautiful phrase is not mine. It is pronounced by Rei Kashino in "Mars" manga by Fuyumi Souryo. And if you don’t know it, go and read it.  
>  I inserted this phrase following an enlightening conversation with [Papysanzo](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Papysanzo89/pseuds/Papysanzo89) (thanks).


	9. 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After a brief clarification between Sherlock and John... it's sexy time, baby.

John checked his phone: there were no new messages from Sherlock. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or feel even more guilty, and when he left the hotel, he opted to go straight to the clinic, without going home to change clothes.

During a pause between one patient and another, he took a sandwich and a coffee from the vending machine in the waiting room. After a few minutes, Sarah joined him.

"After Viagra to Miss Ewans, you prescribed a mammogram to Mr. White: that’s a little too much."

"Oh god, did I really do it?" John asked softly.

Sarah laughed, putting a hand on his shoulder: "No, I was just joking! Relax, John!”

"Sorry."

"New girlfriend? Is it serious this time?" she ventured. They were still friends, so they talked about everything easily.

"Er… no, not exactly like that."

"Complicated relationship, then."

John laughed weakly: "Do you want to become a consulting detective and compete with Sherlock?"

Sarah rolled her eyes.

"I got it: it's him, right? The complicated part of the story, I mean. It's always about him, in the end."

John ran a hand through his hair.

"No Sarah, it's me, I have to tell him something and I don’t know how."

"I need you in perfect shape on the workplace, and right now you aren’t," Sarah replied, relentlessly. "So go home, do what you have to do, and be clear. It’s about time, I’d say."

She patted him on the back again, and returned to her patients.

John nodded to himself and left the clinic: Sarah was right, he couldn’t keep going on like this.

 

The door of their flat was open, as usual. Sherlock sat in his chair, his hands clasped under his chin, which was also a usual position for him.

Yet there was nothing usual in the shy  _ "hello" _ that John said as he entered the living room, or in the strange look Sherlock gave him, as if he was seeing him for the first time in his life.

John opened the fridge, "Is there something edible in there? I'm hungry."

"We can go out for dinner," Sherlock suggested, getting up.

"No, not tonight."

John turned, finding Sherlock in front of him, his grey eyes darting fast on his body.

A long dark hair between John’s shirt and vest, marked dark circles under his eyes, a bruise on the neck, the scent of roses and jasmine: Joy by Jean Patou. As he suspected, John had spent the night before with a woman and they had sex. Once, no, twice.

Why had John done that, if he was attracted to him? 

A dark vibration resounded brusque within him, and Sherlock felt the crazy, sudden desire to lock up John in their flat and never let him out again. It was a strange, unpleasant medley of fear and possessiveness.

John put his hands on his hips, took a deep breath and moistened his lips.

"Listen Sherlock, we have to talk."

_ "He wants to leave you. He has replaced you with this woman and he'll leave. You'll be alone, if you don’t stop him. Do something, right now!" _

For the first time in his life, panic induced him into a wrong deduction, forced him to put aside logic and reason, and Sherlock let himself be guided by instinct.

He lunged forward and gripped John in a suffocating hug, crushing him against the refrigerator.

"Sherlock, leave me immediately!" John screamed, but his tone was anything but peremptory. At best it could be said it was whiny.

Sherlock’s lips pressed hard on his temple, as if he wanted to burn the words directly into his brain.

"Don’t leave, I can give you what you want, everything."

Meanwhile, John had placed his hands on Sherlock’ sides with the intention of pushing him away, but hearing those words, he found himself squeezing and cursing those few millimeters of silk that separated him from Sherlock’ skin.

_ "He gave you his consent, take him! Bend him on the table and make him yours." _

How he managed to ignore that temptation, John never knew.

"Sherlock, you don’t know what you're saying," he hissed with an immense effort.

"I know very well, instead! It's what you want, your body speaks for itself, why can’t you accept what you're feeling?"

"It’s not that!" John cried, exasperated, finally managing to put a few centimeters of distance and sanity between them. "It’s not that," he repeated, breathless.

"So what's the problem?" Sherlock roared in anger: he hated not understanding what was going on, and he was completely lost.

"I know what I feel for you, Sherlock. The problem is what you feel, or rather: what you don’t feel."

Sherlock shook his beautiful black curls, frustrated: "I don’t understand."

John closed his eyes, trying to calm down, because Sherlock’s naive look was a serious assault on his self-control.

"You can’t offer your body as if it were a bargaining chip, I could never accept it, I wouldn’t do anything like that to you, never."

"Why? You want it."

"But you don’t: you aren’t interested in it, you're married to your work. Physical contact, feelings, love, are a nuisance to you, a problem. What do you call them? A chemical defect found on the losing side." 

And John would never have been satisfied to have only Sherlock’s body, as wonderful as it was, if he couldn’t have his heart too. He could fuck a random woman he met down the street, just a one night stand, but he would never have taken advantage of the person he was in love with, no matter how strong the call of the flesh was.

He cautiously opened his eyes and saw Sherlock gesturing with an expression halfway between desperate and beeseeching.

"But we already have a relationship: we talk, we laugh, we support each other, we watch movies together in the evening! You said that there are these things in a relationship, and I love these things with you."

John gaped at him: he vaguely remembered saying something like that, but it had been months ago.

"I need you John, I need your company and your help… I would be lost without my blogger." [2] Sherlock said, and then stood there motionless, looking at him in the eye. He had used all his communication skills to make John understand, and he didn’t know what else he could do.

_ "He doesn’t have a shred of notions of astronomy, he wouldn’t recognize the Queen even if she was in front of him, but he perfectly remembers things you told him ages ago. Other people search for him for hours and he don’t give a toss about it, but you say you're worried and he answers you right away. He faked his death for you, to save your life, and when he came back, he accepted your fists and your insults without reacting, he, the king of the last word. Do you deduce anything from it? Do you really need those three damn magic words to understand what he feels for you?" _ John experienced a slight dizziness when his thoughts went quickly from  _ "Oh God, Sherlock loves me"  _ to  _ "Why the hell I never realized it?" _

He passed his hand over his face, feeling the most colossal douchebag in the world. Just because he didn’t express them, it didn’t mean that Sherlock had no feelings. And he should had known better than anyone else.

Instead, it had been Sherlock the one to throw himself head first into that  **thing** , that huge, frightening and beautiful  **thing** that they were discovering that evening, between the narrow walls of their kitchen.

In another moment, John would have punched himself for his silly fears and useless paranoia. He still thought he could do it later.

"I'm an idiot," he sighed, letting the relief invade him.

"I know, I always tell you."

"In my defense I can say that Sherlockian language is not always easy to interpret."

"It may have been that I had marginally contributed to create an unfortunate misunderstanding."

"You, admitting that you're wrong? The world is about to end."

They looked at each other, exchanging a small smile.

"And, about that other thing,” continued Sherlock, swallowing nervously, “I thought about it."

"Now I don’t follow you, what other thing?"

"The thing that, in your opinion, completes a relationship."

"Sex?" John asked in a feeble voice, his body suddenly winded up. 

_ "Let it be that, let it be that..." _

"Mh," Sherlock nodded, looking at the floor, and John didn’t miss the fact that he had blushed.

_ "Oh, he's not talking about it anymore as if it were a geology essay, now he's involved." _

The thought made John lick his lips. Sherlock Holmes embarrassed and erotic at the same time was too much for his poor heart. Christ, this man would have been his sweet death.

"I think I might like it," Sherlock mumbled, swaying on his heels.

"Think?"

"I don’t know, actually I have no idea," he admitted candidly, "I've never tried."

"All right, you've never been with anyone, but you have... alone… you did…” John stopped in front of Sherlock’s blank face. “I mean, sometimes you masturbate, right?”

Sherlock shook his head: "No. Or if I did, I must have deleted the experience from my Mind Palace, because it was irrelevant or unsatisfactory."

"Deleted," John repeated, thunderstruck.

"Yes, deleted," Sherlock echoed him, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

All right, this shifted the concept of virginity beyond the purely physical plane. It was a mental dimension. What else to expect from Sherlock?

Only the idea of being the first to explore that body, to touch and kiss him, to bring him to orgasm, was so intense that it made John dizzy.

"But I know the mechanisms of mating on the theoretical level... Do you... do you want to try?" Sherlock asked, timidly.

If John wanted to try? A part of him was quivering to show him how much eager he was. John smiled and held out a hand to him: "Come here."

Sherlock came over and hugged him again, this time clutching his waist with a clumsy and light grip. 

John's hands surrounded his face, the index finger that lingered for a moment on the dimple of the upper lip, then pulled Sherlock, and finally their lips met for the first time.

Just a gentle pressure, followed by a shock of surprise for Sherlock, and a tingling of pleasure for John.

John drew back to study Sherlock’s reaction, to deduce from his wide eyes and a half-open mouth if he liked it. Sherlock nodded several times, assertive, and John put again his lips on Sherlock’s plump ones, tilting his head for the best angle, while one hand moved on his neck and the other buried in his hair, rhythmically stroking his nape and playing with the curls between the fingers.

Sherlock unconsciously tightened his grip on his hips, and John smiled. He pulled back for a moment, opened his mouth and caught Sherlock’s lower lip, soft and pulpy, sucking it gently until he heard a weak moan.

A moment later, Sherlock mirrored him, taking John's upper lip between his own. They went on for a long time, eyes closed, exploring their faces with the lips, exchanging kisses on the cheeks, the tip of the nose, the eyes, the forehead, but always returning to the mouth, as if suddenly they couldn’t be separated for more than a few seconds.

John pressed his thumb on Sherlock's chin to separate their lips and catch his breath; he opened his eyes, dazed by the view of that mouth, swollen and red by his kisses.

Sherlock leaned back toward him, claiming another kiss, but John pulled away with a mischievous smile. Sherlock moaned his disappointment and tried again, and John met him, clashing with him halfway, starting a decidedly more passionate kiss, biting his lips and drawing the outline with his tongue, insisting on that perfect dimple that was driving him crazy.

Hesitant, Sherlock's tongue darted out of his mouth, briefly touched John's, and then drew back, timidly, and John pursued it.

Sherlock stiffened at that strange sensation, then welcomed in his mouth the intrusion of John's tongue that tickled his palate, lapped the inside of his cheeks and rubbed roughly against his. 

Then John withdrew it quietly, and Sherlock followed, sneaking it into John’s mouth, rewarded by a satisfied groan. Oh. It worked like that, then? Enjoyable. 

Really enjoyable, he added, when John started to suck it.

Soon the kisses weren’t enough, and were followed by hands that sneaked under the shirts, and erections pressed against each other. 

There was nothing left to hide now.

But John didn’t want to hurry too much, that night he was determined not to go beyond the incredible snogging session against the refrigerator (and, god, he would never again complain about its contents). 

He was determined for real, even when Sherlock pulled back, dragging John with him, and they stumbled along the corridor to Sherlock’s bedroom.

Here John suddenly let him go, holding firmly to the door jamb, because he knew that if he crossed that threshold, he wouldn’t be able to stop.

He broke the kiss and lowered his head, breathing long gulps of oxygen, looking for a minimum of lucidity. Not easy, with Sherlock’s hands stroking his back, his lips in his hair and his own erection that begged to be released.

"John," his baritone whispered, making John’s fingers gripping convulsively the wood of the jamb.

"I believe… nngh..." John had no idea what he believed, because Sherlock was sucking his earlobe. “Let's go slowly," he gasped, "it's your first time."

"But if you don’t come in, there will not be any first time," Sherlock sighed.

Now, how could anyone expect self-control on his part, in front of such a strict logic and those violinist fingers that opened the buttons of his shirt, pressing the knuckles on his chest? How could anyone believe that he was able to resist that deep voice that kept invoking his name like a mesmerizing siren song?

"John, I want you," Sherlock said, staring at him with his grey eyes, absolutely clear and sincere.

"Bollocks!" John roared. He let the door jamb go and pushed Sherlock into the room, pulling off his shirt. Their other garments were scattered on the floor in the short ride to the bed, where Sherlock fell on his back, naked, excited and beautiful, heavy lidded, his fast breathing betraying his nervousness.

"Are you sure?" John asked, standing in front of him, out of breath just like him.

Sherlock didn’t answer, but propped himself up on his elbows and moved to make room for him, and John didn’t need any more words.

He lay down slowly on him, and the feeling of skin on skin, hot and sweaty, was so intense that made them both moan in surprise.

They rolled between the sheets, lacing their limbs shamelessly, Sherlock's hands moving up and down John's spine, making him shudder, John’s hands doctor grabbing his buttocks and rocking his pelvis against his.

"Ooh, oh John," Sherlock moaned on his mouth.

John kissed him again with ardor, then bent his head and took possession of his long and pale neck, so long dreamed; he ran his tongue over the tendons and the fine wrinkles, nibbling and kissing every inch of skin, from the jaw to the shoulder, paying particular attention to the hollow of his throat and then back to the Adam's apple that vibrated as Sherlock moaned.

He was biting hard his lips in an attempt not to shout, but John touched them with his fingers to let them open.

“No, I want to hear your voice."

He wanted to look, listen and feel everything about Sherlock. After stupidly denying his feelings, now he wanted to engrave in his mind every moment of that night.

And Sherlock was vocal; John would never have imagined it, but he really was, as John peppered his skin with red hickeys, on the clavicles, on the hairless chest, just below the diaphragm, something that Sherlock liked a lot, judging by the loud "Aaah!" that echoed in the room.

 

Sherlock hands wandered without coordination on John's body, on his broad shoulders, on his nape, scratched his forearms, ruffled his short hair, touched every part of his John he could reach. He grabbed his wrist, bringing the hand to his mouth, kissing his palm with reverence, and licking one by one those fingers that were guiding him safely in an unexplored territory. 

He had no idea that his body could experience a such intense pleasure that clouded his mind and made him garble those indecorous sounds. He didn’t believe he could be so receptive to the touch of another human being.

_ "No, to John's touch, only John's," _ it was one of his few coherent thoughts of that night. Then John closed his lips around his left nipple, plunging his mind into a oblivion of uncontrolled pleasure and sobs.

 

John murmured his name, voice hoarse with desire, and descended again, with exasperating slowness, rubbing his face on Sherlock’s flat stomach, inhaling deeply the smell of his skin, moist with sweat. 

He touched the navel with his fingers and saw the muscles of the abdomen quivering. Mh, someone was very sensitive down there. 

He kissed it, and that loud "Aaaah" echoed in the air again, this time deep and prolonged, a sound that went straight to John’s groin: pleasuring Sherlock, exploring and being explored was proving to be the most erotic experience he had ever had.

He grasped the thin, delicate flesh of Sherlock’s navel between his teeth, pulling, biting, then drew the outline of that delicious hole with his fingers, tickling him mercilessly, and finally he sank his tongue in it, again and again, just to hear Sherlock groan and see him arching against him, his nails biting his nape. It was a perfect, little hole and, lifting his head slightly, John wondered how it would have been to pour something sweet on it and then lick it off. Something like...

"Whiskey mousse," suggested Sherlock’s breathless voice, as he raised himself on his elbows to look at John.

"Yesss," John sighed, leaving a trail of quick kisses on his hip bone.

"Do you... mmh... want to to know… ah ah, yes, there... how did I... nnh... deduced?"

"No, not particularly right now," John got up on his four, gently spreading Sherlock’s knees, stroking the silk skin of his inner thighs, taking a moment to admire his erect penis that stood out between his legs.

_ "Soon," _ he promised himself,  _ "soon." _

So far, he had neglected his own erection, focusing only on making Sherlock enjoy the experience, but the signals from his body were clear, and he wouldn’t last long. He sank his fingers into the firm flesh of his legs and Sherlock shivered, his gaze so full of anxiety and expectation that it made John shudder, too.

Without knowing why, John found himself thinking about his first time with a high school classmate, in a closet of the gym. He had been so excited that he came even before she could undo her bra.

Now, he didn’t want it to end too soon, he wanted Sherlock to enjoy that experience to the hilt.

"Can you do something for me?" John whispered, rubbing his nose against the pale skin of Sherlock’s thigh.

"I... ah... nngh... what?" 

Putting together a meaningful sentence was too much of an effort.

"Hold on as much as you can," John said and then saw Sherlock's look changing from confusion to ecstasy, when he closed his fist around his penis, enveloping him in a tight, slow caress, from the base to the tip. 

Sherlock, reduced to pure instinct, frantically pushed his hips against John’s hand, his face twisted by pleasure and his mouth wide open in a long, inarticulate cry.

John ran his hand in the opposite direction, revealing the pink and swollen glans. He had never done anything like that, but taking Sherlock in his mouth, tasting his warm flavour on the tongue, was like responding to a natural and irrepressible need.

 

"JOHN!"

A pure wave of ecstasy washed on him, starting from his groin and exploding in his brain, erasing every conscious thought that wasn’t John, kneeling between his legs. John, his hand tickling his pubic hair. John, his hot mouth, his tongue so sweet and cruel.

And when John moved his other hand to Sherlock’s testicles, there was no room in his head for anything, except for that pleasure, so intense that it bordered on pain and agony.

He would have died, if John continued to touch him that way, he would have died for sure. But when he felt John’s hands abandoning him and the cold air hitting his erect penis, he implored him, "No, don’t stop John. Again, again!”

He wanted to burn and be consumed completely in that fire, he wanted to be touched and led to madness by John’s fingers and mouth.

 

John sat down in the middle of the bed and spread his legs.

"Come here, Sherlock." he gasped, then pulled Sherlock’ sweaty, docile body to him, putting him in his lap.

Their erections touched and instinctively Sherlock's legs tightened around John’s back, while his mouth searched desperately John’s one and poured his moans into it.

"Don’t you want...?" Sherlock asked with trembling voice. That wasn’t the ideal position to be penetrated.

"No, not this time," John whispered on his neck, before licking it again, “this night is all for you."

He brought a hand between them, grabbing their erections, and reality lost consistency. There was only hard flesh, twitching with desire, wet with pre-come, sweat, saliva, there were only continuous and inarticulate moans, and kisses more similar to hungry bites.

One of Sherlock’s hand joined John’s. Yes, Sherlock was touching him and John threw his head back screaming, as if every cell in his penis was reacting to his caresses.

And then the world shut down to increasingly intense rubbing, tighter gripping, faster and faster pumping, no more thoughts, only sensations.

Sherlock’s curly head fell on John’ shoulder, his free hand clawed his shoulder, tearing the skin; the lean body stiffened, and finally Sherlock came for the first time, the orgasm shaking his body.

John accompanied every splash of hot seed with the thrust of his hand; it was as if he were born, grown up and lived only for that moment, to see Sherlock discovering ecstasy in his arms.

John kept moving his hand and rocking his hips, and when Sherlock whispered reverently his name, John, like it was a prayer, it was too much for him, too. He came violently, his eyes full of Sherlock’s languid face, watching him in the most intimate moment.

 

Sweating and shaking, they clumsily untangled their limbs and John helped Sherlock to lie down, because he didn’t seem able to coordinate the movements well. Seeing him like that,  lying dizzy on the bed, caused a wave of tenderness in John’s chest almost as powerful as his orgasm. He brushed the disheveled curls off his forehead and placed a light kiss on it, then lay down next to him. For long minutes there were only their harsh breaths that slowed down, and the strong smell of sex filling the room.

"John?" he managed to articulate after a couple of failed attempts.

"Yes?"

"I didn’t imagine it was like that, I had no idea," he whispered, with a surprised smile on his lips. "You know, I don’t think I could ever erase this from my Mind Palace."

"I'll take it as a compliment," John answered, before kissing him on the lips again.

"It is."

Sherlock returned the kiss, sweet, exhausted and perfect.

Then John began to feel unpleasantly sticky and stood up looking for his vest, with which he cleaned both of them. He stood for a moment beside the bed, his garment crumpled in his hands: he didn’t know if Sherlock liked the idea of sharing the bed with him or if he preferred to be alone in his Mind Palace.

"Do you want me to leave?" he asked hesitantly.

Sherlock astonished him, grabbing him firmly by the wrist, bringing him back on the mattress, and John ended half lying on top of him.

"You stay here," he said calmly.

And John was probably really an idiot who saw but didn’t observe, and would never have Sherlock’s deductive skills, but it was not hard for him to understand that Sherlock wasn’t referring only to that night, that it wasn’t just an invitation to share the bed for a little cuddling after sex.

_ You stay here, John, by my side. This is the place you belong to. _

John simply answered "Yes," because the knot in his throat prevented him from saying anything else without embarrassing himself. He rolled on his side, looking over his shoulder. Sherlock blinked quickly and then understood, curling up against John’s back with a satisfied sigh, his curly hair on John’s neck and his mouth between his shoulder blades, where he placed some sleepy kisses.

John was about to give in to sleep, too, when he felt Sherlock's long fingers resting on his neck, on the bruise left by Mary the night before. 

John winced and an icy blade of remorse pierced his chest. 

"I’m sorry," he whispered. "It's just another proof that I'm an idiot."

Sherlock's hand moved to the carotid, taking the pulse, reached the heart, where he paused with his palm open, and then descended fast, wrapping gently around his flaccid and satisfied penis. 

John squeezed his eyes, but didn’t move away, even though he was still too sensitive to be touched. Sherlock was deducing his body and he deserved a little torture.

"It doesn’t matter," Sherlock said, moving his hand over John’s abdomen. "It was before."

John put his hand on Sherlock's and intertwined his fingers.

Yes, it had been before returning to the place to which he belonged.

Forever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [1] The first sentence is taken from ACD canon, The adventure of the Priory school, _"But I need your company and assistance"_ , the second one from TGG, _"I'd be lost without my blogger."_


	10. 10

As soon as John opened his eyes, memories of the previous night flooded his brain, and he greeted the new day with a stupid smile on his face.

The awakening would have been even more pleasurable without Sherlock's elbow, which was pushing right onto his spleen, but John would have willingly sacrificed some internal organs to be able to wake up like this every morning.

He turned his head and found Sherlock’s face a few inches away, so beautiful and relaxed in his sleep that it made his heart hurt: the long, thick eyelashes, the slightly swollen lips, the curly hair that seemed to caress his forehead and neck, the rhythmic rise and fall of his narrow chest... how could he be so perfect in the early morning, when the rest of the world population was more similar to a bunch of zombies? And how could he be so erotic simply by sleeping and breathing?

John moved away, thanked by his spleen, slipped out of bed as quietly as possible, and went to the bathroom. He felt twenty years younger [1] and he couldn’t stop smiling, even when he examined in the mirror the red scratches left by Sherlock on his good shoulder. In fact, he felt disgustingly proud of himself that he had made Sherlock lose control.

He got into the shower, regretting for a moment that he hadn’t awakened Sherlock to take it together: there were so many things he wanted to do with him and on him, that the next three reincarnations wouldn’t had been enough.

Lost in his fantasies, he noticed with a moment of delay that he was humming a silly song, and laughed. Good god, he was really humming in the shower like the main character of a sappy rom-com: the orgasm must had burned his neurons.

He wrapped a towel around his waist and got to the sink, where he shaved and brushed his teeth.

"Good morning John."

Sherlock's velvety voice preceded his appearance in the door frame. 

He had to be in love with John for real, because he had the decency to wear his boxers, avoiding a fatal overload to John’ synapses, and allowing him to respond to his greeting.

Not that the rest of Sherlock's body was a less lethal sight, especially in the warm morning light, with all the marks that John's hands and mouth had left on him. 

John's gaze wandered from the reddened navel to the hips, where the deep marks of his fingerprints would had been visible for days and, oh! John didn’t remember leaving that hickey just below Sherlock’s right clavicle. But it was his neck the zone that most of all carried the evidence of John’s passion, peppered with small bites and scarlet marks that stood out like a red traffic light on the pale skin.

"I'm sorry," John began, but Sherlock raised an eyebrow skeptically, and John reformulated the sentence because, no, he wasn’t sorry at all, not even a little bit.

"Can you imagine what people will say now?"

"Is it a problem for you?"

John shook his head, sure, "No, absolutely."

"So are... are you fine?" Sherlock asked, gesturing in his direction.

John laughed briefly.

"I should be the one asking that to you."

"Oh, I'm fine, perfectly fine... last night has been... illuminating."

"A firework," John agreed.

Sherlock approached him, smiling: John feared that Sherlock would have had troubles accepting immediately that they had made love, as relationships weren’t his area; had also prepared himself to deal with sulking and second thoughts, but he was happy to be wrong.

Only when Sherlock was closer to him, John noticed the small black bottle in his hand.

"What's this?" he asked indifferently, thinking of shampoo or bubble bath.

Sherlock threw the bottle in the air and then grabbed it.

"Lubricant," he answered calmly.

John spat the toothpaste into the sink.

"What?" He asked in a choked voice.

"I thought we could repeat last night's experience, with some variations," Sherlock answered, biting his lips. Hmm, given John's reaction, probably that kind of proposal wasn’t meant to be so direct. He took note of it in his Mind Palace.

"Now?" John swallowed hard.

"Don’t you want to?"

"Well... I'll be late for work."

_ "Not my problem!" _ John’s cock retorted. That part of him was enthusiastic about Sherlock's idea. 

John cleared his throat, "Anyway, I didn’t know we had lube at home."

"We haven’t, I went to ask it to the Ripleys, Mrs. Turner's tenants."

This time John almost swallowed the toothbrush.

"Are you crazy? Why did you do that?"

"Because they're closer than the drugstore."

Ah well, flawless objection.

"Oh, and I came across Mrs. Hudson," Sherlock continued, deadpan, "she said that she's very happy for us, she just wants us to be less vocal in the middle of the night, but as I think I can’t control myself, we should seriously consider the idea of making love in your room, from now on, at least after a certain time."

He fought every day with almost illegal chemical experiments and parts of corpses in the fridge, he chased criminals all over London, and was the official blogger of the only consulting detective in the world, who had just outed them to their landlady and neighbours.

Here was the life of John Hamish Watson.

"And what do you mean when you talk about variations?" John chirped.

_ "I know it!" _ his cock stood up proudly under the towel, like a pedantic schoolboy who raised his hand to answer the teacher's question.

_ "Please, be quiet, you,"  _ John pleaded.

"I mean,” Sherlock replied, positioning himself behind John and tickling his nape, “that this morning is all for you."

And he put the bottle in his hand.

John squeezed the bottle and closed his eyes, overwhelmed by the erotic images in his mind and the wild beat of his heart. He put the toothbrush back in its holder, because he seriously risked to swallow it accidentally. 

Sure, that was one of the many things he wanted to do to Sherlock, but it seemed too soon. 

"Am I wrong or we decided to go slowly?" he asked, suddenly breathless.

"Yes, you're wrong, it's something that you have established alone."

The tip of Sherlock's tongue licked the scratches on John’ shoulder one by one, while his fingers lingered on the edge of the towel.

"S-Sh-Sherlock, f-f-or god s-s-sake, it will hurt."

Damn fricatives.

"Are you sure? On several websites I've read about very satisfying experiences for both parties."

Sherlock's arms surrounded his waist and his mouth was now torturing the side of John’s neck.

"Theory and practice are two completely different things."

"I agree."

"Actually I… ooh… hmm..." the rest of the sentence faded into a moan, because Sherlock's lips had moved behind John’s ear, finding one of his favorite erogenous zones and, between the heat pooling in his lower abdomen and the continuous provocations of his evil lover, John felt the rationality abandon him quickly.

"Give me ten minutes," Sherlock whispered, kissing him lightly under the lobe and pushing him gently toward the door.

John went back to the bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed, trying to regain control of his crazy thoughts, rebellious breathing, galloping heart, and the anarchic erection that didn’t want to calm down. 

No, it was a titanic and out of reach enterprise for a poor retired captain of fusiliers.

And then, truth was that he was dying to have Sherlock, to possess him in the most physical and deep way. Literally.

If he had still a shred of shame, he would have blushed at that thought, but the idea of what was going to happen in that room was too strong, and John had relegated and locked decency and modesty in a small closet of his mind.

_ "I'll be sweet, I'll be delicate," _ he said to himself,  _ "if I survive." _

John wasn’t sure about that, seeing Sherlock in the doorway, naked and dripping, his curls shiny and weighed down by water.

It was very likely that John would die of a heart attack in front of Sherlock walking slowly toward him, without taking his eyes off John.

The apparition (because he was so beautiful that John began to doubt he was real) knelt before him, creeping into space between his legs.

John leaned over to him, claiming a kiss, licking his fresh lips that tasted like toothpaste; their tongues slid softly on each other, Sherlock's nose pressed hard on his cheek and the smell of freshly washed skin filled John’s lungs.

Without a word, Sherlock gently pulled away from the kiss and lowered his eyes to John’s cock, to that clear drop that trembled on the swollen and dark glans, and put his lips there, sucking it away.

He barely hid a grimace tasting that strong and unknown flavour.

"You don’t have to do it," John groaned in a voice that was shaky and untruthful, so much that he could had yelled,  _ "Don’t stop, do it again" _ instead.

"I want do it," Sherlock answered softly. He really wanted it, he wanted everything from John, even his bitter and salty taste; he wanted to absorb John with every fiber of his being and fill every room in his Mind Palace with his presence.

He gently stroked the base of John’ shaft and sticked out his tongue out again, moving it in small and quick licks on the glans, like a cat drinking milk from a saucer.

 

"Oh God!" John closed his eyes and inhaled hard, while Sherlock continued that slow exploration with his hands and mouth, probing every vein and every skin fold of his cock.

He was awkward and insecure, he kissed, licked and left long trails of saliva without any coordination; he shouldn’t have been so damn erotic, yet he was making John scream and claw his wet hair.

Sherlock traced his tongue from the base to the tip and John watched, mesmerized, as he closed his mouth around his glans and sucked, the soft velvet of those heavenly lips around his most sensitive nerve endings.

Christ, it was like he was fucking his brain.

"Wait!" The word came out of John’s mouth with a strangled cry, and he brutally pulled Sherlock’s head back a moment before it was too late.

Sherlock looked at him, stupefied, paralyzed by what he read in John’s eye: it wasn’t anger, but something equally heated and wild. And despite this, he wasn’t frightened by those flaming feelings, indeed, he was irremediably attracted to them.

"On the bed, now!" John ordered. He lifted him, making him land on all fours on the mattress and spreading his legs. He held him by the hips as he sank his teeth in the perfect globes of his buttocks, and Sherlock sobbed loudly in surprise.

John rubbed his back, licking away the last drops of water, crushing him with all his weight, then grabbed him again by the nape, forcing him to turn his neck to kiss him greedily.

"You're mine, Sherlock!"

He was crazy and drunk on him, and had never felt such a violent happiness that threatened to break down his ribcage.

 

Sherlock exhaled a faint  _ 'yes' _ among breathless sighs, while John returned to position himself between his legs. He believed that, after the first time, sex would have be less shocking. He should have known what to expect, right? Instead, every John’s gesture, kiss, touch, bite was like the first time again, every time.

An electric shock ran through his body, making him jump, when John's fingers stroked mercilessly his perineum, a spot of his body inviolate for thirty-five years and... 

"Yes, John... ah, ah, AAH!"

 

The 9 times multiplication table.

John had always hated it, it took him months to learn it and he couldn’t imagine anything less sexy than that. And, at that moment, thinking of it seemed the only thing that could distract him from Sherlock's deep voice, which threatened to make him come even before he had time to open the bottle of the lubricant.

He had wondered if Sherlock’s loud groans of pleasure could bring him to orgasm alone, and he risked having a positive answer.

He poured the dense gel on his fingers and put his index on Sherlock's hole. He wasn’t surprised to feel it tight and stiffened, and for long seconds he only massaged it in slow circles, while with his other hand stroked Sherlock’s cock and testicles to distract him.

He inserted his finger slowly, moving it in and out for a while to spread the lube, and Sherlock suddenly lowered his head between his shoulders, shuddering at the intrusion.

John patiently continued his massage until he felt the tension melt; he withdrew his finger, poured more lubricant and went back inside him, adding another finger, pushing deeper, until he felt Sherlock completely relaxed as he started to moan, "nnh... nnh... nnh..." in synchrony with the movement of John’s fingers.

John leaned over him, kissing the base of his back, and slowly pulled out his fingers. He didn’t know if Sherlock was ready, actually, but he couldn’t wait any longer.

"Sherlock, I want to watch you."

He felt a physical need to see that enigmatic face transfigured by pleasure because of him. John touched his shoulder, making him roll on his back, and brought his long legs behind his back.

They looked into each other's eyes, Sherlock took a deep breath and John rocked his hips, penetrating him.

_ "I'm inside him." _

 

_ "It's inside me." _

It was painful, more than the fingers, more than he had expected; it burned despite John's being delicate and slow. 

Then he felt one of John’s hand close around his throbbing erection, stroking the glans in small circles, lingering with the little finger on that little mole near the base, moving now fast, now slow, tightening the grip, turning his wrist, until his mind was full of the pleasure John was giving him.

Only then, John began to move, with slow and soft thrusts, bending him in half, never letting go of his erection, kissing his chest, going up to his neck, jaw, chin, until he reached his mouth, that he kissed with the greed of a thirsty man in the desert.

There were so many feelings, so many emotions that he was losing his mind. He would never be able to catalog them all, he could only let go and rely completely on John, with his blue adoring eyes, his kisses, his strong and warm hand that found his own and held it in a firm grip.

The tip of John's cock touched his prostate, and an explosion of pleasure made him lose control of mind and body. He arched his back, clinging to the sheets, maybe he screamed, because when he landed on the mattress again he felt his throat burning.

Above him, John was still, his eyes closed, breathless, overwhelmed by pleasure.

"Sherlock," he heard him murmur.

Sherlock stroked his face and hair, and realized they were together in that  **thing** , completely and without escape: John could take the complete control of him, make him forget even his name, but at the same time, John wouldn’t have never looked at anyone else with his eyes clouded by pleasure and love.

"Sherlock," John repeated, touching his forehead with his, “Christ, you have no idea what you're doing to me."

Responding with a groan seemed inadequate, but unfortunately his brilliant mind was less than collaborative at that moment, but John seemed to like it, judging by the shiver that shook his body.

John pulled back and sank in, brushing against his prostate again for endless seconds, holding him on the edge of an overwhelming pleasure, then leaned his forehead against Sherlock’ shoulder and pushed hard, making him come.

Sherlock opened wide his mouth to cry out that marvelous agony as he felt the burst of pleasure exploding in every cell of his body.

John felt him clenching his buttocks tightly, clinging hard to him with his arms and legs, and everything became too tight, too hot, too crazy, and he came too.

It was perfect, there was nothing else he wanted, only the flesh and heart of Sherlock Holmes. 

"I love you, I love you," John managed to scream, before the orgasm completely clouded his mind, causing him to collapse on Sherlock's sweaty chest, worn out.

As soon as Sherlock relaxed his muscles, John slipped out of him, but he had no further energy to move and, anyway, Sherlock had caged him in his arms and didn’t seem to want to let him go.

"I’m sticky," Sherlock whined after a while, "I need another shower."

"Oh god," John groaned in theatrical desperation as he buried his face between Sherlock’s neck and shoulder, "give me a break, I'm not eighteen anymore."

There was an awkward pause, then Sherlock ventured, "John, maybe my neurological processes are slowed down by the excessive production of endorphins, but I can’t grasp the link between age and personal hygiene."

"Ah, you meant just a shower."

John raised his head to look into his eyes, feeling almost a pervert for the drift of his own thoughts.

"Yes, that's what I said," Sherlock replied, puzzled.

That was another side of Sherlock that had made John lose his head over him. A moment earlier he gave him a powerful, earth-shaking orgasm, and the next one he was as naive as a child.

Sherlock had frowned in the meantime, thinking about John’s words, "Oh, you mean there may be sexual implications in taking a shower?"

The image of Sherlock under the spray of water, crushed by John’s body against the blue tiles of the bathroom, impressed in his mind like an etching.

"Yes," he answered with a little tremor in his voice.

"Interesting, will you show them to me?"

"Tomorrow, love. As I told you, I’m not so young anymore."

John rested his head on Sherlock’s chest, sighing happily. Sex was great, but he had just discovered that he had a weakness for the moments that followed orgasm, when their bodies lay close, exhausted, satisfied and defenseless.

 

Love.

It was the second time in seven minutes that John said that word aloud.

Of course they loved each other. They wouldn’t have been on that bed if it hadn’t been like that, wasn’t it obvious? To him it was, but maybe not to John. Maybe he would have liked to hear it.

"John, me too. I..." he started, but was interrupted by the delicate caress of John's fingers on his lips.

"I know," John sighed and kissed his chest at the height of his heart. "You've already told me so many times."

Sherlock frowned.

"Are you sure? I don’t remember it, and I assure you it's impossible for me to erase what you mean to me from my mind, so..."

John's fingers pressed more firmly to his lips.

"You did it, Sherlock, trust me."

_ "Want to see some more?" _

_ "I was proving a point." _

_ "I would be lost without my blogger." _

_ "That... uh... thing that you did... that you offered to do... that was… um... good." _

_ "What I said last night is true, I have no friends, I just have one." _

_ "You are a conductor of light." _

_ "Goodbye John." _ [2]

Lots of Sherlockian  _ “I love you". _

However, as John slid into his sleep, thought he felt Sherlock's lips in his hair, and the warm, enveloping sound of those three words.

He loved that he always wanted to have the last word.

 

* * * * *

 

The days were getting shorter and the summer was giving way to a humid and rainy autumn.

Early morning. 

Crime scene. 

A man lay on the floor with his skull smashed. Scarce blood stains, no trace of the murder weapon, no obvious sign of break-in, locked room.

As soon as he stepped into the room, Sherlock smiled like a cat that had just caught his prey, and John pulled out his notebook: by now he knew that when his lover had that smile, they were facing a very interesting case, and soon his blog would have been updated.

Anderson was blabbering something, insisting they should looking for a mysterious blond flatmate who, according to his reading of the evidences, existed for sure.

Sherlock opened the bathroom cabinet and rolled his eyes at such speed that John feared for the integrity of his eyeballs.

"If you want to waste your time and taxpayers' money unnecessarily, please, be my guest. She wasn’t a flatmate of the victim, only an old flame and she hasn’t been here for at least six months. Besides, it wasn’t a serious relationship, she only used to sleep here every now and then," stated Sherlock, recovering a toothbrush from the bottom of the cabinet.

"And a toothbrush told that to you? You are making up everything, and that toothbrush could belong to the victim! Chief, was it really necessary to call him?" Sally Donovan barked, earning a grim look from John.

It was a pity that looks couldn’t kill, or at least silence the idiots who persisted in seeing only a freak in Sherlock, and were so envious and obtuse to refuse to recognize how brilliant he was, and continue to insult him, and god, it made him mad!

Sherlock noticed the storm of anger and indignation that stirred in John's blue eyes, his clenched jaw and tight fists, so he got closer to him, brushing his arm with his and giving him a smart look that meant,  _ "Watch this." _

"This toothbrush tells me more things than you idiots have discovered in three hours. It has a brilliant colour, so it didn’t belong the the victim, who preferred neutral colours. There are residues of toothpaste congealed along the handle, and they’re six or seven months old, I could be more precise with a laboratory analysis. And this particular model has been on the market for a few months, in a period between one year and eight months ago, than it had been withdrawn due to a design flaw. It’s almost new, used no more than four times, when the woman stopped here to sleep. Ah, and she’s not a natural blonde, but a dyed brunette."

He smiled, satisfied to see the usual shocked expressions of the duo of investigators who accompanied Lestrade, while the detective inspector shook his head, halfway between resigned and amused.

"Extraordinary!" John exclaimed. He would never grew tired of repeating it: every time Sherlock used his deductive skills, he felt the same astonishment of that first night in the cab.

"Anyway, for the few times the woman was here, it was a waste to buy this toothbrush," Sherlock went on, making it jump between his fingers. "She could have used that of the victim."

"Seriously, Sherlock?" Lestrade wrinkled his nose in disgust. "That’s gross! I didn’t even do it with my ex-wife."

"Ridiculous: If two individuals can explore each other's oral cavities with their tongue, like John and I do, I don’t see why they could not use the same toothbrush from time to time."

And here's how the Scotland Yard team learned about their relationship.

 

* * * * *

 

On the most cold and windy November afternoon of the last ten years, out of the clinic, John heard himself being called by someone on the other side of the street.

"Ohi, doc!"

He raised his hand to greet Violet. The girl gave a glance at the road and then crossed it, slamming on the brakes of her bicycle in front of him. 

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"Home."

"Come on, I'll give you a ride."

John gave her an uncertain look, but then got on the rear wheel of the bicycle, and Violet began to pedal vigorously in the traffic. She turned her head from time to time to comment the posts of John’s blog, and before they were in sight of Baker Street, she overtook two busses in a way that John judged at least risky. 

He breathed a sigh of relief when they arrived home safe and sound.

"I would never want to be in the shoes of your insurance agent," John said, dismounting from her bicycle.

"What? I went slowly and was cautious today, I didn’t want to hear his complains,” she pointed with the thumb the window on the first floor, “if you got injured."

"Do you want to come up for a hot tea? Today it’s freezing."

"Another time, now I have to run away, but before I forget it…” she reached out to him and smacked a kiss on his cheek, “Congratulations! I have always said that you are a great couple."

"How do you know?" John asked in shock.

Someone knew they were together, by now, thanks to Sherlock's absolute lack of tact and discretion, but John had never advertised the news publicly. Not that he cared about what people thought or said about them, but it was something private, and the idea of being spied on like they were living in a sort of Big Brother world was a little disturbing.

"I hacked an email from Inspector Lestrade to Mycroft. Give that kiss to Sherlock from me, along with everything else from you!" She shouted, laughing as she rocketed off with the bike, before John had time to stretch his hands and strangle her.

 

* * * * *

 

Spring again. Nightingale Lane, office of the CEO of the London branch of an oil multinational company.

They entered the building disguised as HMRC officers, with a fake search warrant, and now they were ransacking some file cabinets.

"Sherlock, I'm worried, I don’t think they’ve bought it," John said, bouncing nervously on his feet, eyeing the empty corridor from behind the half-open door.

"Take it easy."

"And you hurry up!"

The consulting detective calmly photographed some dossiers.

"Patience, John. Patience is the virtue of the strong."

"Yes, and soon it will be the virtue of the dead!" exclaimed John, seeing two security guards come out of the elevator with weapons in hand.

He took the fire extinguisher and signaled Sherlock to move, then crouched behind the door, and when the two men opened it, John flooded them with the extinguishing powder, before escaping from the building with Sherlock.

"John, remind me to complain with Clemens for the poor quality of his products," shouted Sherlock, running ahead of him.

Clemens was a former forger and fence, who occasionally printed a fake police warrant for Sherlock, or a fake invitation to some private and exclusive ceremony.

"Don’t make me laugh idiot, I’m short of breath!" John rebuked him: it was already hard enough to keep up with his pace.

Sherlock turned to him, disheveled, face reddened, eyes sparkling with excitement, beautiful. So beautiful that, as soon as they were safe within the walls of their flat, John would have made love to him, until they could no longer move a muscle.

"Take my hand," Sherlock shouted.

John took it without hesitation, and without any intention of letting it go.

"Yes!"

They ran through Clapham Common [3], their fingers intertwined, laughing like a perfect pair of idiots.

 

END

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [1] Quote from ACD canon, His last bow: "I feel twenty years younger, Holmes."  
> [2] Quotes from the TV series.  
> [3] A park of London.
> 
> Thanks to anyone who has read, left a kudo or bookmarked this little fic ♥ ♥ ♥


End file.
